Most shell scripts don’t need if

Open any seasoned engineer’s dotfiles and you’ll notice something odd: barely any if statements. Meanwhile your deploy script has five levels of nesting and a trust problem.

The secret is two operators you already half-know: && and ||.

Exit codes are the whole trick

Every command ends with an exit code — a hidden report card. Zero means success; anything else means failure. Your CI pipeline lives and dies by this number, and so can your scripts.

&& — “and then”: run the next command only if the last one passed.
|| — “or else”: run the next command only if the last one failed.

You already think this way: tests pass, and then deploy, or else page someone. That’s a pipeline. Now write your scripts like it.

Before and after

The textbook version:

if [ -d "$dir" ]; then
  cd "$dir"
fi

The one-liner:

[ -d "$dir" ] && cd "$dir"

Reads like a sentence: directory exists, and then enter it. Four lines become one, and nothing was lost but ceremony.

The guard clause pattern

|| is your script’s code reviewer, rejecting bad input at the top:

[ -f "$config" ] || { echo "missing config" >&2; exit 1; }
[ -n "$API_KEY" ] || { echo "API_KEY not set" >&2; exit 1; }
mkdir -p "$out" && cp "$src" "$out" && echo "done"

Check, bail. Check, bail. Then do the work. It’s the shell version of early returns — the same trick that makes functions readable.

Why this style wins:

Scannable — each line is one complete thought.
Flat — no staircase of nested blocks.
Honest — every failure path is visible, right where it happens.

Where the shortcut bites

One trap: a && b || c is not if/else. If b fails, c runs too. That bug has shipped more times than anyone will admit in standup.

So keep real if for genuine either/or branches with multiple steps. Use the operators for guards, defaults, and chains — which is, honestly, 90% of every script you’ll write.

FAQ

Does this work outside bash? Yes — zsh, dash, every POSIX shell. It’s older than git. Older than Linux, even.

How do I check an exit code myself? Run a command, then echo $?. Zero is success. Try it with true and false — the two most honest programs ever written.

Is nesting if statements actually bad? Not bad — just harder to scan six months later. Flat guard clauses read top-to-bottom like a checklist, and future-you loves a checklist.