Bash Cookbook

Passing your program flags

After going into your shell and opening a new file in your favorite editor, let's get started by creating a Bash script that does the following:

• When no flags or arguments are specified, prints out a help message
• When either the -h or --help flags are set, it prints out a help message
• When the -f or --firstname flags are set, it sets the the first name variable
• When the -l or --lastname flags are set, it sets the the last name variable
• When both the firstname and lastname flags are set, it prints a welcome message and returns without error

In addition to the basic logic, we can see that the code leverages a piece of functionality called getopts. Getopts allows us to grab the program parameter flags for use within ...