Why am I getting "too many arguments"

Question

Here's a part of my script that is telling me that I have too many arguments on line 3:

#!/bin/bash
export LC_ALL='C'
if [ `echo "*file 2" | grep -o ^.` = '.' ]
then
    echo success
fi

Anybody know why? As far as I can tell, I'm just comparing two arguments, "*" and "."

Solution

echo "*file 2" | grep -o ^. prints *.

Since you have a command substitution outside double quotes, it undergoes globbing (a.k.a. wildcard matching a.k.a. filename generation) and word splitting. If the current directory is not empty, * expands to the list of files in the current directory. Each file becomes one token in the [ command, which is highly likely to be a syntax error.

The problem is that you didn't use double quotes around the command substitution. Always use double quotes around variable and command substitutions unless you have a good reason to omit them.

if [ "$(echo "*file 2" | grep -o ^.)" = '.' ]

See Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters? for a more detailed explanation.

Comments

[Aaron]

Thanks, I'm still new to shell scripting, so all help is appreciated!

[FantomX1]

single quotes had the same problem though and normally they seemed to work