I wrote these snippets for version comparison and they are not in good quality but enough for me.

The following code is an implementation which compare arithmetically and alphabetically:

But I later found it can’t return the correct result I expect for 1.0 and 1.0rc1. So, I decided to strip and made a simplified version, it will die hard when non-digits are supplied.

I think there is another quick way to compare, using sort -V. sort can sort version strings, too. You feed it with two lines of version strings, then see which is returned first. But, I don’t think it covers all strange versioning schemes.