In bash at least, if and case blocks are closed like this: if some-expr then echo "hello world" fi case $some-var in [1-5]) do-a-thing ;; *) do-another-thing esac as opposed to the more typical close of end or endif/endcase. As far as I know, this rather funny convention is unique to shell scripting and I have never seen such an odd block terminator anywhere else. Sometimes things like this have an origin in another language (like Ruby's elsif coming from Perl), or a strange justification. Does this feature of shell scripting have a story behind it? Is it found in other languages?