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

### the answer is does we second argument is higher
function _ver_higher {
        ver=`echo -ne "$1\n$2" |sort -Vr |head -n1`
        if [ "$2" == "$1" ]; then
                return 1
        elif [ "$2" == "$ver" ]; then
                return 0
        else
                return 1
        fi
}

if _ver_higher $1 $2; then
        echo higher
else
        echo same or less
fi

It's pretty simple and small.