Command line parameter problem in scripts ?

[Steven W. Orr]

On Tuesday, Oct 10th 2006 at 13:26 -0600, quoth Kim Lux:

=>On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 18:20 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
=>
=>> > How do I get $1 to be * rather than just a specific file ?  
=>> 
=>> You can't. The shell that you are running is what is expanding the "*", 
=>> not the script.
=>> 
=>> Try changing the script not to use $1 instead:
=>> 
=>> =======================================
=>> echo
=>> echo Arguments are "$@"
=>> 
=>> for eachFile in "$@"
=>> do
=>> 	...
=>> done
=>> =======================================
=>
=>Using $@ works perfectly.   echo "$@" returns a list of files in the
=>directory when called with myscript *
=>
=>THANKS !

I think fuzyok doesn't like you. :-)

There's a difference between $*, $@ and "$@". You need to read the bash 
man page about 50 times. It's all there.

If you do globbing on the commandline (like you should) then you have a 
couple of ways to write your script.

One way is to process all of the arguments in the commandline like you did 
above
for ii in "$@"

Another way is to have a loop that always refers to $1 and to call shift 
after processing an argument

while [[ -n "$1" ]]
do
    dosomething $1
    shift
done

And, you can get $1 to be * (if you really really want to). I suspect you 
don't. Just run your program with the * in single quotes to prevent 
expansion.