Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Summary

In this chapter, you examined how to deal with arguments and options in shell script. Specifically you looked at the following methods:

• Manually handling arguments and options using a case statement

• Handling options using getopts

You worked through two examples that illustrate the implementation and rationale behind each method. In addition, you saw several special variables that pertain to arguments and command execution.

As you will see in later chapters, using options greatly increases the flexibility and the reusability of your shell scripts.