Passing Arguments to the Script

Arguments can be passed to the script when it is executed, by writing them as a space-delimited list following the script file name.

Inside the script, the $1 variable references the first argument in the command line, $2 the second argument and so forth. The variable $0 references the current script. In the following example, the script name is followed by 6 arguments.

Example

my_shopping.sh file contains below code.

#!/bin/bash
echo "File name is "$0 # holds the current script
echo $3 # $3 holds banana
Data=$5
echo "A $Data costs just $6."
echo $#

Executing the script on the terminal as:

bash my_shopping.sh apple 5 banana 8 "Fruit Basket" 15

the output is:

File name is my_shopping.sh
banana
A Fruit Basket costs just 15
6

The variable $# holds the number of arguments passed to the script.

The variable $@ holds a space-delimited string of all arguments passed to the script.

Exercise

Pass "Shell is fun" (3 arguments) to the script prog.sh as arguments and print the length of the arguments.