shell if statement always returning true - shell

Question

I want to check if my VPN is connected to a specific country. The VPN client has a status option but sometimes it doesn't return the correct country, so I wrote a script to check if I'm for instance connected to Sweden. My script looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
country=Sweden
service=expressvpn
while true; do
if ((curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep $country | grep -v "grep" | wc -l) > 0 )
then
echo "$service connected!!!"
else
echo "$service not connected!"
$service connect $country
fi;
sleep 5;
done
The problem is, it always says "service connected", even when it isn't. When I enter the curl command manually, wc -l returns 0 if it didn't find Sweden and 1 when it does. What's wrong with the if statement?
Thank you
Peter

Answer 1

(( )) enters a math context -- anything inside it is interpreted as a mathematical expression. (You want your code to be interpreted as a math expression -- otherwise, > 0 would be creating a file named 0 and storing wc -l's output in that file, not comparing the output of wc -l to 0).
Since you aren't using )) on the closing side, this is presumably exactly what's happening: You're storing the output of wc -l in a file named 0, and then using its exit status (successful, since it didn't fail) to decide to follow the truthy branch of the if statement. [Just adding more parens on the closing side won't fix this, either, since curl -s ... isn't valid math syntax].
Now, if you want to go the math approach, what you can do is run a command substitution, which replaces the command with its output; that is a math expression:
# smallest possible change that works -- but don't do this; see other sections
if (( $(curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep $country | grep -v "grep" | wc -l) > 0 )); then
...if your curl | grep | grep | wc becomes 5, then after the command substitution this looks like:
if (( 5 > 0 )); then
...and that does what you'd expect.
That said, this is silly. You want to know if your target country is in curl's output? Just check for that directly with shell builtins alone:
if [[ $(curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address) = *"$country"* ]]; then
echo "Found $country in output of curl" >&2
fi
...or, if you really want to use grep, use grep -q (which suppresses output), and check its exit status (which is zero, and thus truthy, if and only if it successfully found a match):
if curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep -q -e "$country"; then
echo "Found $country in output of curl with grep" >&2
fi
This is more efficient in part because grep -q can stop as soon as it finds a match -- it doesn't need to keep reading more content -- so if your file is 16KB long and the country name is in the first 1KB of output, then grep can stop reading from curl (and curl can stop downloading) as soon as that first match 1KB in is seen.

Answer 2

The result of the curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep $country | grep -v "grep" | wc -l statement is text. You compare text and number, that is why your if statement does not work.
This might solve your problem;
if [ $(curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep $country | grep -v "grep" | wc -l) == "0" ] then ...

Answer 3

That worked, thank you for your help, this is what my script looks now:
#!/bin/bash
country=Switzerland
service=expressvpn
while true; do
if curl -s https://www.iplocation.net/find-ip-address | grep -q -e "$country"; then
echo "Found $country in output of curl with grep" >&2
echo "$service not connected!!!"
$service connect Russia
else
echo "$service connected!"
fi;
sleep 5;
done