Bash convention for if ; then

Question

From this web page :

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/abs-guide.html

It\'s mentioned the usage of the if bracket then convention which need a space after the semicol

Answer 1

Semicolon ; is an operator (not a keyword, like braces { }or a bang !) in Shell, so it doesn't need to be delimited with white space to be recognized in any POSIX-compliant shell.

However, doing so improves readability (for my taste).

Semicolon needs to be escaped if you mean a symbol "semicolon", not an operator.