Executing two or more commands in sequence - Why/When/How

[Habitual]

As you may or may not know every command exits with a status. An exit status of 0 is true, while everything else is false.
Additionally, the exit status is stored in the $? variable.

To execute two or more commands in sequence regardless of the failure/success of the previous command, you can use a single semi colon ";" in between of your commands. For example:

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$ mycommand1 ; mycommand2

In this example, mycommand2 will be executed after mycommand1 have been accomplished, successfully, or unsuccessfully.
you can test this with these 2 commands by using:

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false ; whoami
true ; whoami

whoami executes in both examples regardless of the true|false command's exit status.

[Logical OR] OR logical operator
To execute the next command in condition of when the first command fails, you can use logical OR operator which is double pipes "||".

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$ mycommand1 || mycommand2

mycommand2 in this example will only be executed if mycommand1 failed.
you can test this with these 2 commands by using:

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false || whoami
true || whoami

[Logical AND]AND logical operator.
To execute the next command in condition of when the first command is successfully accomplished, you can use logical AND operator which is double ampersand "&&". Look at this example:

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$ mycommand1 && mycommand2 && myucommand

You typically see this when you have to install from source

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./configure && make && make install

each successive command depends on the successful completion of the previous.

In this last example, mycommand2 will only be executed when mycommand1 is successful. etc..

I am not a programmer. I am a "Machete Coder" (Chop and Hack / Trial and Error methods)
So don't hold me responsible! As will all things Linux, verify it for yourself!

References:
Command Lists Logical Operators
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Enjoy!

[xenopeek]

[Logical And/Or] or is it [Logical Either/Or]? <--- Clarification needed here.

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$ mycommand1 ; mycommand2

There is nothing logical about the ; control operator It does sequential execution of each command. And don't forget about the & control operator, also useful here I think.

From the manpage:

If a command is terminated by the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background in a subshell. The shell does not wait for the command to finish, and the return status is 0. Commands separated by a ; are executed sequentially; the shell waits for each command to terminate in turn. The return status is the exit status of the last command executed.

[Habitual]

Vincent:

Yes, I was confusing the Logic issue with Truth Tables.
Something I picked up in my software-cracking days with PhrozenCrew.

I have to (re)learn new stuff to push out the old stuff, I guess.

[Arliegiles]

We can execute multiple commands by using logical operator..