Shell Programming and Scripting

I am new to the world of Unix and shell scripting and have been trying to get the following simple script to work:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
             echo "what is your age?"
             echo "you are $1 years old"

I want to be able to enter my age on the command line, when prompted, and it return the appropriate response ie "you are 37 years old" in my case. I'm not too sure what I'm doing wrong. I would be very grateful for any help.

Thanks in advance

Al

Welcome to the forum.

If you want to use the command line argument like this, you have to pass the argument at the time of running the script. ( unlike prompting for it )

Code:

$ cat arg.sh
age=$1
echo "you are $age years old"
$ 
$ ./arg.sh 26
you are 26 years old
$ 
$ 
$ 
$ cat read.sh
echo -n "what is your age? "
read age
echo "you are $age years old"
$ 
$ 
$ ./read.sh
what is your age? 26
you are 26 years old
$ 
$