All shell scripting is just running commands in a shell terminal. The language is designed as if you're at a VT100 terminal typing commands in by hand. Pressing

All shell scripting is just running commands in a shell terminal. The language is designed as if you're at a VT100 terminal typing commands in by hand. Pressing 'Enter' key tells the shell to evaluate whatever was just typed in. A semi-colon is the equivalent of the 'Enter' key. Most commands allow you to pass arguments to them (and so don't need a semi-colon after) unless they are the end of a block, like done, fi, esac, etc, which don't take arguments, so they would get a semi-colon or newline after them. Most things want some whitespace between each element, so for example "[1-lt2]" doesn't parse, but " [ 1 -lt 2 ] " does. If you read the man page from top to bottom, pretty much all your questions will go away. Bash is only as confusing and mysterious as every other language. Imagine trying to use C++ without ever reading a book on how C++ works. Bash is much simpler! But you should read the man page!