"unary operator expected" error in Bash if condition

If you know you're always going to use Bash, it's much easier to always use the double bracket conditional compound command [[ ... ]], instead of the POSIX-compatible single bracket version [ ... ]. Inside a [[ ... ]] compound, word-splitting and pathname expansion are not applied to words, so you can rely on

if [[ $aug1 == "and" ]];

to compare the value of $aug1 with the string and.

If you use [ ... ], you always need to remember to double quote variables like this:

if [ "$aug1" = "and" ];

If you don't quote the variable expansion and the variable is undefined or empty, it vanishes from the scene of the crime, leaving only

if [ = "and" ];

which is not a valid syntax. (It would also fail with a different error message if $aug1 included white space or shell metacharacters.)

The modern [[ operator has lots of other nice features, including regular expression matching.

It took me a while to find this, but note that if you have a spacing error, you will also get the same error:

[: =: unary operator expected

Correct:

if [ "$APP_ENV" = "staging" ]

vs

if ["$APP_ENV" = "staging" ]

As always, setting -x debug variable helps to find these:

set -x

Try assigning a value to $aug1 before use it in if[] statements; the error message will disappear afterwards.