Question

I understand how the if function works in bash, but the problem is that I don’t get what it means if you aren’t comparing it with something. I know there are a bunch of switches like -e or -c or -f, but when would the following code get evaluated as true?

if [ "$VAR" ]; then
  echo "TRUE"
else
  echo "FALSE"
fi

I’m trying to interpret a script someone wrote for me.

Answer 1

From help test:

     STRING      True if string is not empty.