First: you output the header line to <stderr> and the rest to <stdout>. This is possible, but <stderr>, as the name suggests, is for error messages and even if it does what you expect it to do you should reconsider.

Second: you haven't specified a certain shell to use (which you should indeed do), but your usage of "print" suggests you using a Kornshell. You do not need I/O-redirection in this case, Kornshells "print"-statement knows the parameter "-u<descriptor>", so that:

Code:

print -u2 "text to print"

will do the same as

Code:

print "text to print" >&2

Further, you do not need the "\n" at the end, print automatically adds a newline if you skip the "-n" option, which suppresses exactly that. Lastly, you should routinely use the "-" as the last option to make sure the string you want to print doesn't end up as being interpreted as parameter:

Code:

print -u2 - "text to print"

will work even if "text to print" would be replaced by text containing legal options to print, which would otherwise break your code. Here is an example:

Code:

text="-u2"
print "$text"         # will print nothing, because "$text" expands to an option
print - "$text"       # will print "-u2" as expected

Finally, I'd like to quote your first post:

Now that you know how to relate the "header" variable with the "-h" option you should not just copy what you found on the net, but put that mechanism to use for your own goals. Define a variable "header" and either put "-h" in there or not, depending on the "-h"-option being invoked or not. This should not be too hard, given that you now know how to use "getopts". Then use what is mentioned in your book to get what you want.

Here is a tip: you can look at the code while it executes and see what the shell really sees by using the "set -xv" command. Swithc that on with "set -xv" and off with "set +xv", like this:

Code:

#! /bin/ksh

# this part will be executed normally:

typeset variable="value"
typeset othervar="othervalue"

#watch execution from here:
set -xv

print - "variable: $variable     value of othervar: $othervar"

#switch it off again:
set +xv

print - "variable: $variable     value of othervar: $othervar"

exit 0

Save this to "myscript.ksh", slap on the excution bit and try it with:

Code:

./myscript.ksh 2>&1 | more

Tracing messages arrive at <stderr> and are first redirected to <stdout> ("2>&1"), then output is paginated by "more", which is not necessary in case of the short sample. For longer script parts, though, it is.

As "set +/- xv" only switches on and off tracing you can add it to interesting parts of scripts, watch what they do and move these commands around to inspect other parts. I do that regularly in my own scripts as part of my debugging routine.

I hope this helps.
bakunin