A better-known form of the test command is the [ command. The primary difference between the two is that ] must be the last argument to [. This makes it look very much like a special syntax for shell script, but it isn't; it's just another command:

$ [ "$myshell" = 'bash' ] && printf 'Match!
'

Being a command, this syntax can be used after if, just like the grep and cd examples earlier in this chapter:

myshell=bash
if [ "$myshell" = 'bash' ] ; then
    printf 'Match!
'
fi

This is all specified by POSIX. Note that we still had to quote our variable to prevent special characters in its value from causing unwanted glob or whitespace expansion.