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

Here is another pure bash solution without any external calls:

#!/bin/bash

function version_compare {

IFS='.' read -ra ver1 <<< "$1"
IFS='.' read -ra ver2 <<< "$2"

[[ ${#ver1[@]} -gt ${#ver2[@]} ]] && till=${#ver1[@]} || till=${#ver2[@]}

for ((i=0; i<${till}; i++)); do

    local num1; local num2;

    [[ -z ${ver1[i]} ]] && num1=0 || num1=${ver1[i]}
    [[ -z ${ver2[i]} ]] && num2=0 || num2=${ver2[i]}

    if [[ $num1 -gt $num2 ]]; then
        echo ">"; return 0
    elif
       [[ $num1 -lt $num2 ]]; then
        echo "<"; return 0
    fi
done

echo "="; return 0
}

echo "${1} $(version_compare "${1}" "${2}") ${2}"

And there is even more simple solution, if you are sure that the versions in question do not contain leading zeros after the first dot:

#!/bin/bash

function version_compare {

local ver1=${1//.}
local ver2=${2//.}


    if [[ $ver1 -gt $ver2 ]]; then
        echo ">"; return 0
    elif    
       [[ $ver1 -lt $ver2 ]]; then
        echo "<"; return 0
    fi 

echo "="; return 0
}

echo "${1} $(version_compare "${1}" "${2}") ${2}"

This will work for something like 1.2.3 vs 1.3.1 vs 0.9.7, but won't work with 1.2.3 vs 1.2.3.0 or 1.01.1 vs 1.1.1