Solaris™ 8 Advanced System Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

Built-in Shell Variables

All three shells have a set of single-character variables that are set initially by the shell, as shown in Table 83. You can use these variables to access words in variables and return other information about the variable. These variables are used differently in the C shell than they are in the Bourne and Korn shells.

Bourne and Korn Shells Built-in Variables

Table 83 describes the built-in variables initialized by the Bourne and Korn shells.

Table 83. Built-in Variables Initialized by the Bourne and Korn Shells

Variable	Explanation
$*	List the value of all command-line parameters. This variable is useful only in scripts because the login shell has no arguments associated with it.
$#	Return the number of command-line arguments ...