Question

I have written the following .bashrc :

# .bashrc
# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
        . /etc/bashrc
fi

# User specific aliases and functions


function up( )
{
LIMIT=$1
P=$PWD
for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT; i++))
do
    P=$P/..
done
cd $P
export MPWD=$P
}

function back( )
{
LIMIT=$1
P=$MPWD
for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT; i++))
do
    P=${P%/..}
done
cd $P
export MPWD=$P
}

However, after saving, when I did source .bashrc, i got the following error: if: Expression Syntax.

What am I doing wrong ? I googled a while but no avail.

Answer 1

if: Expression Syntax 

is not an error bash would give you. Perhaps your shell is not bash. In fact, as long as if stands alone, any error would not be with if itself:

$ if [somethingswrong]; then fail; fi # error, then `[` command must have space around it.
-bash: [somethingswrong]: command not found

You can check your shell by echoing $SHELL, and you can check which version of bash with $BASH_VERSION. (If the latter is unset, your shell is not bash.)