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Positional Parameters
- Thread starter RJSHA1
- Start date
Yes, there's a limit -- two kinds of limit actually. One that's easy to work around and one that's large enough to hardly every cause you a problem.
First one.
In a shell script you can only refer to $1 thru $9, this is a pain only until you realise you can call "shift" and everything shifts down one, so that the $10 you couldn't get at is now $9.
Second one.
There's a hard limit to the number of parameters that get passed to any program. This will probably differ from shell to shell but for ksh (if I remember correctly) it's 255.
So -- you can get up to 255 parameters into your shell script but you have to call "shift" to get at any thing past the nineth one. Mike
________________________________________________________________
"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us, after we are bald."
Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.
First one.
In a shell script you can only refer to $1 thru $9, this is a pain only until you realise you can call "shift" and everything shifts down one, so that the $10 you couldn't get at is now $9.
Second one.
There's a hard limit to the number of parameters that get passed to any program. This will probably differ from shell to shell but for ksh (if I remember correctly) it's 255.
So -- you can get up to 255 parameters into your shell script but you have to call "shift" to get at any thing past the nineth one. Mike
________________________________________________________________
"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us, after we are bald."
Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.
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