OSCP Linux Practice Exam

Short-circuiting with exit status is the mechanism here. In the shell, && runs the next command only if the previous one exits with status 0 (success). grep returns 0 when it finds a match and non-zero otherwise, so using grep searchTerm && echo hi will print hi only when a match exists, matching the semantics of the if block but in a compact form.

This is more efficient and idiomatic than the if construction because it eliminates boilerplate while preserving the same behavior. If you only care about the success of the search and want to avoid printing the matching lines, you could add -q (grep -q searchTerm) before the &&. The other options don’t reproduce the same conditional flow: || would run the second command on failure, a pipe would pass output into the next command rather than gate execution, and a semicolon always runs both commands.