Comparing PHP version numbers using Bash?

Here’s how to compare versions.

using sort -V:

function version_gt() { test "$(printf '%s\n' "$@" | sort -V | head -n 1)" != "$1"; }

example usage:

first_version=5.100.2
second_version=5.1.2
if version_gt $first_version $second_version; then
     echo "$first_version is greater than $second_version !"
fi

pro:

• solid way to compare fancy version strings:
  • support any length of sub-parts (ie: 1.3alpha.2.dev2 > 1.1 ?)
  • support alpha-betical sort (ie: 1.alpha < 1.beta2)
  • support big size version (ie: 1.10003939209329320932 > 1.2039209378273789273 ?)
• can easily be modified to support n arguments. (leaved as an exercise 😉 )
  • usually very usefull with 3 arguments: (ie: 1.2 < my_version < 2.7 )

cons:

• uses a lot of various calls to different programs. So it’s not that efficient.
• uses a pretty recent version of sort and it might not be available on your
  system. (check with man sort)

without sort -V:

## each separate version number must be less than 3 digit wide !
function version { echo "$@" | gawk -F. '{ printf("%03d%03d%03d\n", $1,$2,$3); }'; }

example usage:

first_version=5.100.2
second_version=5.1.2
if [ "$(version "$first_version")" -gt "$(version "$second_version")" ]; then
     echo "$first_version is greater than $second_version !"
fi

pro:

• quicker solution as it only calls 1 subprocess
• much more compatible solution.

cons:

• quite specific, version string must:
  • have version with 1, 2 or 3 parts only. (excludes ‘2.1.3.1’)
  • each parts must be numerical only (excludes ‘3.1a’)
  • each part can’t be greater than 999 (excludes ‘1.20140417’)

Comments about your script:

I can’t see how it could work:

• as stated in a comment > and < are very special shell character and you should replace them by -gt and -lt
• even if you replaced the characters, you can’t compare version numbers as if they where integers or float. For instance, on my system, php version is 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.

But your function version() is quite cleverly written already and may help you by circumventing the classical issue that sorting alphabetically numbers won’t sort numbers numerically ( alphabetically 1 < 11 < 2, which is wrong numerically). But be carefull: arbitrarily large numbers aren’t supported by bash (try to keep under 32bits if you aim at compatibility with 32bits systems, so that would be 9 digit long numbers). So I’ve modified your code (in the second method NOT using sort -V) to force only 3 digits for each part of the version string.

EDIT: applied @phk amelioration, as it is noticeably cleverer and remove a subprocess call in the first version using sort. Thanks.