topic $# , ${#}, variable substituition question in Operating System - HP-UX

$# , ${#}, variable substituition question

Eric Lipede — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:07:20 GMT

Hi there
hope you guys had a good x-mas.
I have a small question (i hope).

A snippet of my current script is...

if [ $# -ge 2 ]
then
ARG_NUMBER="$#"
echo "$"$ARG_NUMBER""

it returns -> $4

...how do i get it to return the 4th argument (based on ARG_NUMBER) rather than the number of arguments without EXPLICITlLY saying echo $4 ?

Thks

Re: $# , ${#}, variable substituition question

Dennis Handly — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:52:50 GMT

You need to use eval.
Or you can copy the parms to an array:
set -A save -- "$@"
echo ${save[4-1]}

Re: $# , ${#}, variable substituition question

Eric Lipede — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:27:23 GMT

sounds good...ive only used eval on solaris and the only reference to it on my 11.23 box is /usr/lib/builtins/eval (and thats empty) ...is that a download job ?

Re: $# , ${#}, variable substituition question

Dennis Handly — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:35:03 GMT

>is that a download job?

eval is a shell builtin. Try:
eval echo "$"$ARG_NUMBER

Re: $# , ${#}, variable substituition question

Eric Lipede — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:42:09 GMT

gotcha - thks