How to compare a program's version in a shell script?

Suppose I want to compare gcc version to see whether the system has the minimum version installed or not. To check the gcc version, I executed the following gcc --version | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f4 The output was 4.8.5 So, I wrote a simple if statement to check this version against some other value if [ "$(gcc --version | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f4)" -lt 5.0.0 ]; then echo "Less than 5.0.0" else echo "Greater than 5.0.0" fi But it throws an error: [: integer expression expected: 4.8.5 I understood my mistake that I was using strings to compare and the -lt requires integer. So, is there any other way to compare the versions?