Shell Programming and Scripting

What does sh resolve to? I doubt it's ksh or bash by default on SunOS.

Try

Code:

ksh displayname.sh a b c d e f g h I j k l m n o p q r s t u v

probably not a POSIX shell as the standard describes this situation and tells to use braces.

Note that you're using sh; not ksh to run the script (as marked in red above). But the old Bourne shell on Solaris 8 should also be happy with ${15} and ${10}. What is the output from the command:

Code:

type sh

For information, from my "solution" with shift command, it was on solaris 10 (/usr/bin/sh).

It is possible that a shopt or set -o option is missing ?

Regards.

Note that neither Solaris 10 /usr/bin/sh nor Solaris 8 /bin/sh or /usr/bin/sh (I thought it was /bin/sh on a Solaris 8 system, but it has been many years since I had access to a Solaris 8 system) is a Korn shell; they are Bourne shells. But both Bourne and Korn shells should be happy with ${12} when there are that many command line arguments no matter what shell options are enabled.

Of course you can use shift 10 to access positional parameters 11 through 19 as $1 through $9, respectively, in a Bourne or Korn shell. But after the shift, the original positional parameters $1 through ${10} (if it worked) will no longer be available unless they were saved into other variables before the shift 10. If ${10} isn't working and you need to access the 10th positional parameter, presumably you'd want to use shift 9 rather than shift 10 so you could process groups of 9 positional parameters at a time. Even after a shift, $0 should remain unchanged (but if ${11} doesn't work, I won't make any claims about how $0 will behave after any invocation of shift).

Have you or pat_pramod tried running any of these scripts with /usr/xpg4/bin/sh or with ksh instead of using /usr/bin/sh or /bin/sh?

In Solaris, /usr/bin/sh is not a POSIX shell, it is some sort of Sun homebrew shell based on the bourne shell. If you want a POSIX shell, use /usr/xpg4/bin/sh or the /usr/bin/ksh as Don Cragun already suggested.

Code:

$ /usr/bin/sh -c 'set a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o; echo ${12}'
/usr/bin/sh: bad substitution
$ /usr/xpg4/bin/sh -c 'set a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o; echo ${12}'
l
$ /usr/bin/ksh -c 'set a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o; echo ${12}'
l

The result is the same on Solaris 8 and 10.

BTW: In Solaris, /bin is a symbolic link to /usr/bin/, so /bin/sh and /usr/bin/sh are identical.

It's ok for /usr/xpg4/bin/sh, ${20} for exemple work fine.
I check my /usr/bin/sh and /bin/sh, and they are a link to /sbin/sh

Regards.