Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I am new to Unix and shell programming.
I am trying to write a shell program to read 4 variables from command line.
For example,
Please enter your name: somebody
Please enter your address: address
plase enter your phone: phone

I'd like to save all threee variables in my program for further use.
I used

if [ -z "$1" ]
then
$UCB/echo "Please enter your name"
$UCB/echo " "
$UCB/echo -n "ENTER: "
fi
read name
$UCB/echo "Please enter your address"
$UCB/echo " "
$UCB/echo -n "ENTER: "

if [ -z "$1" ]
then
name=""
else
read name
fi

It's not working. Can someone tell me what's wrong with it?

ThanX

Hmmm... You're doing something strage here.

You're grabbing the value for name if $1 is empty. Fine. But then you're
saying if $1 is empty (which it still will be), then set name="", i.e.
lose the value it was just set to?!

Anyway, yes, $1 can be referenced as many times as you want, as long as you're
not trying to reference it inside of a function.

I'd personally save $1 to a variable within the program, i.e. "first_arg=$1" or
whatever.

Cheers
ZB

I am sorry. It was typo.
second name variable should be address.

I tried address= $1. It didn't work.
Is it because within one function?
How do I know that if I am within same function?

Well, for one, make sure you have no spaces in the assignment, e.g.
address="$1" will work - address= "$1" will not.

Also, notice that I have surrounded the $1 in quotes, this takes care of whitespace within the variable.

For completeness, I'll also say that certain use of "set" will set the value of $1 (and other positional params depending on usage), although this isn't an issue within your script.

It might be worth you describing exactly what it is that you are trying to achieve with your script.

When you say "it doesn't work", why doesn't it work? What is the expected behaviour? What is the actual behaviour exhibited? Etc. As Johnny5 would say "More information....".

From your sample script, it doesn't look like you are using functions so that shouldn't be an issue.

Cheers
ZB