What is the difference between “&&” and “;” when chaining commands

Question

What is the difference between the following methods of chaining commands?

cmd1; cmd2
cmd1 && cmd2

Answer 1

If you have command1 && command2, command2 is executed if, and only if, command1 returns an exit status of zero.

; is just a command separator.

$> [[ "a" = "b" ]] && echo ok 

$> [[ "a" = "b" ]]; echo ok 
ok

Answer 2

The first line will execute one command after another, irrespective of whether the first one succeeded or not. The second line is an example of shell logic: it will only execute the second command if the first one succeeded. This is because && is logical and. Therefore, if the first command fails, the logical state of the entire line is known to be false and there is no need to evaluate the second command.

Answer 3

cmd1; cmd2 executes cmd1, then cmd2, no matter what. It it exactly equivalent to putting cmd1 and cmd2 on separate lines. The return status of this compound command is that of cmd2.

cmd1 && cmd2 executes cmd1. Then, if the exit status of cmd1 is zero, cmd2 is executed. The return status of this compound command is that of cmd1 if it is nonzero (so cmd2 didn't run), and that of cmd2 otherwise (if it ran).

if cmd1; then cmd2; fi is mostly equivalent to cmd1 && cmd2. The main difference is that the version with if returns 0 if cmd1 returns a nonzero status.

A command returns 0 to indicate success, and a nonzero error code (between 1 and 255, usually between 1 and 125 as higher values have other meanings) to indicate failure. Thus cmd1; cmd2 means “execute these commands in sequence no matter what”, whereas cmd1 && cmd2 means “execute these commands, but stop immediately if the first command fails”.

You can tell the shell to enter “exit on error” mode by running set -e. In this mode, the shell exits as soon as any command returns a nonzero status, except in conditional constructs (the left side of && or ||, the condition part of if and while). Thus, under set -e, ; (or a newline) is effectively equivalent to &&¹.

¹ _{This isn't to say you can blindly replace && by ; if you've added set -e. For example, ; has lower precedence than &&, so cmd1 && cmd2 || cmd3 is equivalent to set -e; { cmd1; cmd2; } || cmd3. Also, set -e interacts badly with subshells — the details would derail this answer too far.}

Answer 4

More practical, there's a difference between

cd /backup/old; rm * -rf

and

cd /backup/old && rm * -rf

. Besides it's a stupid way, the first one will remove your whole filesystem (or $HOME, depending how it's called) because it runs rm regardless wherever the cd succeeded or not.