How to compare two strings in dot separated version format in Bash?

Question

Is there any way to compare such strings on bash, e.g.: 2.4.5 and 2.8 and 2.4.5.1?

Answer 1

You can recursively split on . and compare as shown in the following algorithm, taken from here. It returns 10 if the versions are the same, 11 if version 1 is greater than version 2 and 9 otherwise.

#!/bin/bash
do_version_check() {

   [ "$1" == "$2" ] && return 10

   ver1front=`echo $1 | cut -d "." -f -1`
   ver1back=`echo $1 | cut -d "." -f 2-`

   ver2front=`echo $2 | cut -d "." -f -1`
   ver2back=`echo $2 | cut -d "." -f 2-`

   if [ "$ver1front" != "$1" ] || [ "$ver2front" != "$2" ]; then
       [ "$ver1front" -gt "$ver2front" ] && return 11
       [ "$ver1front" -lt "$ver2front" ] && return 9

       [ "$ver1front" == "$1" ] || [ -z "$ver1back" ] && ver1back=0
       [ "$ver2front" == "$2" ] || [ -z "$ver2back" ] && ver2back=0
       do_version_check "$ver1back" "$ver2back"
       return $?
   else
           [ "$1" -gt "$2" ] && return 11 || return 9
   fi
}    

do_version_check "$1" "$2"

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