Bash: If line begins with >

Question

I want an if/then statement in Bash and I can't seem to get it to work. I would like to say "If the line begins with > character, then do this, else do something else".

I have:

while IFS= read -r line
do
    if [[$line == ">"*]]
    then
        echo $line'first'
    else
        echo $line'second'
    fi
done

But it isn't working. I also tried to escape the ">" by saying:

if [[$line == ^\>*]]

Which didn't work either. Both ways I am getting this error:

line 27: [[>blah: command not found

Suggestions?

Answer 1

Spaces are needed inside [[ and ]] as follows:

if [[ "$line" == ">"* ]]; then 
    echo "found"
else
    echo "not found"
fi