The Real Linux World

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 02:37, Mark Sargent wrote:

> thanx, Joel. I got the answer from someone on another forum. I had
> missed that $LINES was already set to 50 and that $1 is just an argument
> replacer(?).
> 
> $ ./first-script.sh arg1 arg2 arg3
> 
> In this case, $1 = arg1 , $2 = arg2 , $3 = arg3 and so on.
> Note that $0 = ./first-script.sh
> 
> Whilst I appreciate the power of man, sometimes it's cryptic in the way
> it speaks to you. Cheers.

It is worth the trouble to learn what the shell does first before
trying to understand the other commands.  The shell parses every
command line you type and performs variable substition, i/o redirection,
and wild-card filename expansion before the other programs even start,
thus you won't find them discussed in all those other man pages.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com