Usually, I use square brackets in the if statement:
if [ "$name" = 'Bob' ]; then ... But, when I check if grep succeeded I don't use the square brackets:
if grep -q "$text" $file ; then ... When are the square brackets necessary in the if statement?
The square brackets are a synonym for the test command. An if statement checks the exit status of a command in order to decide which branch to take. grep -q "$text" is a command, but "$name" = 'Bob' is not--it's just an expression. test is a command, which takes an expression and evaluates it:
if test "$name" = 'Bob'; then ... Since square brackets are a synonym for the test command, you can then rewrite it as your original statement:
if [ "$name" = 'Bob' ]; then ... 
if $boolean_var ; then ... doesn't require brackets?
$boolean_var has the value "true" or "false", it works because you're running the command true or false.
if $boolean_var ; then ... does not work if $boolean_var is 0 or 1, see man true and man false.
0 and 1 commands in your $PATH -- but that would be ugly.
[ is actually a command, equivalent (almost, see below) to the test command. It's not part of the shell syntax. (Both [ and test, depending on the shell, are often built-in commands as well, but that doesn't affect their behavior, except perhaps for performance.)
An if statement executes a command and executes the then part if the command succeeds, or the else part (if any) if it fails. (A command succeeds if it exits with a status ($?) of 0, fails if it exits with a non-zero status.)
In
if [ "$name" = 'Bob' ]; then ... the command is
[ "$name" = 'Bob' ] (You could execute that same command directly, without the if.)
In
if grep -q "$text" $file ; then ... the command is
grep -q "$text" $file man [ or man test for more information.
FOOTNOTE: Well, the [ command is almost equivalent to the test command. The difference is that [ requires ] as its last argument, and test does not -- and in fact doesn't allow it (more precisely, test doesn't treat a ] argument specially; for example it could be a valid file name). (It didn't have to be implemented that way, but a [ without a matching ] would have made a lot of people very very nervous.)
nervous argument.
The best way to think of the [ ... ] syntax, is to consider [ to be a program - which it is!
Check this out:
~ $ ls /usr/bin/\[ /usr/bin/[ on the other hand, you're probably not using that version of it since bash also provides [ as a shell built-in.
Anyway, to answer your question: What if does is run the command you give it and see it the return value is 0 or not. You use [ to do other, more interesting comparisons such as string comparisons. See man [ and man bash.
[ is implemented internally, I think that that's what [[ is for.
[ is a built-in. That's why builtin [ works. [[ is somewhat different from [, it does different things.
bash man page. test expr and [ expr ] are listed together.type -a [Without square brackets, GNU bash if supports a logical not operator
Apparently [1] if in GNU bash can accept a logical not operator ("!"):
if ! false ; then echo "! false is true" else echo "! false is false" fi if ! true ; then echo "! true is true" else echo "! true is false" fi displays
! false is true ! true is false [1] This isn't in the GNU documentation, so YMMV. This works in my macOS bash, which identifies itself as "GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (arm64-apple-darwin24)"
help '['