Re: Testing for a value not sent to a shell script

Quoting Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Hi John,

I thought there was a $something that returned the number of arguments
supplied.

Yes, $# should give you the number of arguments.

If I needed to write a script that needed to default to something if a single
argument was omitted, what is that function? For instance cal does current
month and cal with 2009 does the given year.

$# would probably work for that as well. Though, I suspect 'cal' isn't
a shell script, it's probably a C program, and is checking argc.

Thanks for $#

From what I have seen, cal is C. Has interesting logic to handle September
1752.

When I was in a college class on Unix a long time ago, the teacher asigned a
task that nobody was able to complete. A bd script. Given a date as a
parameter, it would return the day of the week. The trick was that this
prticular system was not robust. Some very nasty scripting to tear apart the
output of cal, as I recall. Simpler to just run cal and look at the result.


John McKee