How to check if a shell is login/interactive/batch

I'm assuming a bash shell, or similar, since there is no shell listed in the tags.

To check if you are in an interactive shell:

[[ $- == *i* ]] && echo 'Interactive' || echo 'Not interactive'

To check if you are in a login shell:

shopt -q login_shell && echo 'Login shell' || echo 'Not login shell'

By "batch", I assume you mean "not interactive", so the check for an interactive shell should suffice.

In any Bourne-style shell, the i option indicates whether the shell is interactive:

case $- in
  *i*) echo "This shell is interactive";;
  *) echo "This is a script";;
esac

There's no portable and fully reliable way to test for a login shell. Ksh and zsh add l to $-. Bash sets the login_shell option, which you can query with shopt -q login_shell. Portably, test whether $0 starts with a -: shells normally know that they're login shells because the caller added a - prefix to argument zero (normally the name or path of the executable). This fails to detect shell-specific ways of invoking a login shell (e.g. ash -l).

fish shell

Here's the answer for fish in case any other users stumble upon this page.

if status --is-interactive
    # ...
end

if status --is-login
    # ...
end

echo "darn, I really wanted to have to use globs or at least a case statement"

Fish documentation: initialization