Question

I want to decrypt the selected text if the string “—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–” occurs in the selected text.
I have the following code but it doesn’t show up anything.

#!/bin/bash
xsel > pgp.txt
if [grep -e "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" pgp.txt]
then
gnome-terminal --command "gpg -d -o decrypted.txt pgp.txt"
gedit decrypted.txt
fi

When I run it on terminal after selecting a text it says

line 3: [grep: command not found

I’m new to bash scripting.Any help would be appreciated..
Thank you

Answer 1

It searches an executable called [grep as if argument. if executes its then or else branch depending if its argument execute successfully or not. Yes, [ is a command (synonym for test btw). You probably want

if grep -q -e "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" pgp.txt
then

(added -q so grep doesn’t output anything.)