How to check if a string contains a substring in Bash
bash, sh, shell, string, substring
Solution
You can use Marcus's answer (* wildcards) outside a case statement, too, if you use double brackets:
string='My long string'
if [[ $string == *"My long"* ]]; then
echo "It's there!"
fi
Note that spaces in the needle string need to be placed between double quotes, and the `*` wildcards should be outside. Also note that a simple comparison operator is used (i.e. `==`), not the regex operator `=~`.
Problem
I have a string in Bash: ``` string="My string" ``` How can I test if it contains another string? ``` if [ $string ?? 'foo' ]; then echo "It's there!" fi ``` Where `??` is my unknown operator. Do I use `echo` and `grep`? ``` if echo "$string" | grep 'foo'; then echo "It's there!" fi ``` That looks a bit clumsy.