When you are writing a shell script, there are cases where you need to compare two version numbers, and proceed differently depending on whether one version number is higher/lower than the other. For example, you want to check for the minimum version requirement (i.e., $version – 1.3.0). Or you want to write a conditional statement where the condition is defined by a specific range of version numbers (e.g., 1.0.0 – $version – 2.3.1).