How to check if a string contains a substring in Bash

Question

I have a string in Bash:

string="My string" 

How can I test if it contains another string?

if [ $string ?? 'foo' ]; then   echo "It's there!" fi 

Where ?? is my unknown operator. Do I use echo and grep?

if echo "$string" | grep 'foo'; then   echo "It's there!" fi 

That looks a bit clumsy.

Answer 1

You can use Marcus's answer (* wildcards) outside a case statement, too, if you use double brackets:

string='My long string' if [[ $string == *"My long"* ]]; then   echo "It's there!" fi 

Note that spaces in the needle string need to be placed between double quotes, and the * wildcards should be outside. Also note that a simple comparison operator is used (i.e. ==), not the regex operator =~.