Can grep return true/false or are there alternative methods

Question

I'm trying to write this script for an assignment - it's only the second one I've written so bear with me.

As a part of this script, I need to be able to check if the first argument given matches the first word of file. If it does, exit with an error message, if it doesn't, append the arguments to the file. I understand how to write the if statement, but not how to use grep within a script. I understand that grep will look something like this

grep ^$1 schemas.txt

I feel like this should be much easier than I am making it. Any help appreciated.

Update: I'm getting an error too many arguments on the if statement. I got rid of the space between grep-q and then got an error binary operator expected. I've been poking around at it, but I don't see what it sees.

if [ grep -q ^$1 schemas.txt ]
then
        echo "Schema already exists. Please try again"
        exit 1
else
        echo "$@" >> schemas.txt
fi

Answer 1

grep returns a different exit code if its found something (zero) vs. if it hasn't found something (non-zero). In an if statement, a zero exit code is mapped to "true" and a non-zero exit code is mapped to false. In addition, grep has a -q argument to not output the matched text (but only return the exit status code)

So, you can use grep like this:

if grep -q PATTERN file.txt; then
    echo found
else
    echo not found
fi

As a quick note, when you do something like if [ -z "$var" ]…, it turns out that [ is actually a command you're running, just like grep. On my system, it's /usr/bin/[. (Well, technically, your shell probably has it built-in, but that's an optimization. It behaves as if it were a command). It works the same way, [ returns a zero exit code for true, a non-zero exit code for false. (test is the same thing as [, except for the closing ])

Answer 2

Another simple way is to use grep -ci.
The return value is as in C: return 1 if true and 0 if false.