Go to http://examples.oreilly.com/upt3 for more information on:
showargs
When you're experimenting with shell quoting,
it's nice to be able to see how arguments on a command line are quoted. Here's a
demo of a simple bash script[2] named showargs; you might want to
save it in a file and run it yourself
(Section 35.1). The script shows
how many arguments were passed to it. Then it lists the arguments, one per line,
surrounded by >> << to show
leading or trailing spaces.
cat
Section 12.2, &&
Section 35.14, $#
Section 35.20, path
Section 35.7
%cat showargs#!/bin/bash test $# -ne 1 && s=s echo "I got $# argument$s:" for arg do echo -E ">>$arg<<" done %showargs "Start of path:" $path[1-3] " that's it! "I got 5 arguments: >>Start of path:<< >>/u/jpeek/bin<< >>/bin<< >>/usr/bin<< >> that's it! <<
The output from your shell may differ from that shown above, which is the
result of running showargs in tcsh. bash
doesn't have a $path variable, for example.
And zsh expects a comma, rather than a
hyphen, to separate the range. But as long as the arguments to showargs are quoted properly, you should get the
result you're looking for, with a little tweaking, of course!
—JP and SJC
[2] The script uses bash because, as
this article explains later, its built-in echo (Section
27.5) command has the -E option to prevent
interpretation of special characters.