> When you write if [ -e /etc/passwd ]; then .. that bracket is not shell syntax but just a regular command with a funny name. It’s serviced by /usr/bin/[, or (more likely) a shell builtin. This explains a lot of its surprising behavior, e.g. why it’s notoriously space sensitive: [1=2] is no more valid than ls-l/tmp.

To me this is even more interesting than the size thing. Wth seriously! It changes the way I will think of it next time I'm gonna use it.

I thought perl was a strange language with all the swearing cartoon characters, until I was introduced to bash and all the strange things like the hyphen for a default argument and what not. Writing shell scripts without stackoverflow is so hard because of all such idiosyncrasies (or maybe remanants of the past?).