IFELSE(1)

💅 ifelse(1) — the general commands manual, bestie edition

okay so picture this: it's ifelse(1) from the General Commands Manual, and she is literally the two-branch queen of conditional execution. come sit, I'll explain everything 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

ifelse — do a conditional execution thing, but make it two branches, not one. main character energy fr fr 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

inside an execlineb(1) script, she looks like this:

ifelse [-X] [-n] { prog1... } { prog2... } prog3...

that's it. that's the whole vibe check. ✨

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so ifelse reads prog1... inside a block (peep execline-block(7) if you don't know what a block is, iykyk). then she forks and executes it, and then she waits for it to finish. patient queen. 💜

now here's where it gets spicy 🌶️:

• if prog1 crashes, ifelse prints an error message and exits with 128 plus the number of the signal that killed prog1. yeah. rip. 😭
• if prog1 exits with a return code equal to 0, ifelse calls exec(3) into prog2. slay. ✅
• else, ifelse calls exec(3) into prog3. the other branch ate. 💅

and the lil equivalence, for the shell girlies:

‘ifelse prog1... "" prog2... "" prog3...’ is roughly equivalent to ‘sh -c 'prog1... && exec prog2... || exec prog3...'’

roughly!! not exactly!! don't come for me 🙈

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -n — negate the test. flip it. inverse it. the vibe check, but backwards 🌀
• -X — do not die if prog1 crashes; instead treat the crash as a non-zero (“false”) exit. so dramatic deaths get politely recategorised as just... a no. no cap. 💀

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

the whole friend group, honestly:

background(1), backtick(1), execlineb(1), foreground(1), if(1), ifte(1), ifthenelse(1), pipeline(1), runblock(1), exec(3), execline-block(7)

also, this man page is ported from the authoritative documentation at: https://skarnet.org/software/execline/ifelse.html — go visit her, she's iconic 🌸

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

• Laurent Bercot
• Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> (man page port)

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okay that's the whole page, bestie — every flag, every branch, every signal number, preserved with love 💖

and for the cute sign-off: this one's the Debian build, dated February 14, 2021 — Valentine's Day, because she's that girl 💝 see u in the next man page, mwah 🧚