Bash script has errors
 

First, i am a newbie with bashscripts.
I wrote a bash script that is suppose to check if two files have equal checksome; but it has errors.
here are the errors :
and the script:

You could try this:
The output is a little messy, it talks about file descriptors instead of the file names.

I'd suggest reading the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide, it's got a range of techniques and good explanations.

you can just use cmp

doesnt actually compare the checksome.

This works, any suggestions on how to improve it? code looks messy.

comparing checksum is the same as comparing file contents. if you really want to compare checksum,
if the result is 1, then they are the same.

Your problem is that you don't have spaces after [ and before ]; that means the shell concatenates what's next to it, preventing it from finding an appropriate command.
Kevin Barry

PS Why do you end lines with :?

wow that works good, i did not even know about the uniq command.

I am used to C where spaces dont matter muchA site online showed it with a :

Interesting. ':' is equivalent to 'true' in the shell (both are generally shell builtins). I'm interested what the site that you picked that up from had in mind.

That's only if it's the command, though. Could be a typo for ;.
Kevin Barry

true, it could be a typo, but you can also do something like this:

I'm interested to know if smeezekitty ran across a more sophisticated version of this.

As already posted there are neater ways of solving the problem but here are some suggestions about the shellscript itself in case they are of any interest. Mostly indentation so the logic/functional flow stands out. Also

• changed "" to '' (heuristic: never use double quotes where single quotes will do)
• escaped exit (with \exit) to defend against exit being an alias rather than the intended built-in
• removed final "end" command (what did it do?)

You could add error traps to ensure that $1 and $2 are readable files.

Ending the script with a ':' is equivalent to having the last line of the script be:
exit 0
Having it at the end of each line will give each line of code an exit status of '0' which is probably not a good thing -I mean if you do error checking after running a line of code, having ':' at the end would destroy whatever exit code the line of code ahd generated.