Question

I’m checking a counter in a loop to determine if it’s larger than some maximum, if specified in an optional parameter. Since it’s optional, I can either default the maximum to a special value or to the maximum possible integer. The first option would require an extra check at each iteration, so I’d like to instead find out what is the maximum integer that will work with the -gt Bourne Shell operation.

Answer 1

I’d stay clear of integer limits as they’re non portable and problematic

$ test 123412341234112341235 -gt 1 || echo bash compares ints
-bash: test: 123412341234112341235: integer expression expected
bash compares ints
$ env test 1 -gt 123412341234112341235 || echo coreutils compares strings
coreutils compares strings

Instead I’d just do as you suggest and do the extra comparison like:

[ "$limit" ] && [ $count -gt $limit ]