Shell Programming and Scripting

This is very central to the whole unix thing -- many false rumors float around this. A script is a pretty fully qualified executable in UNIX, compared to other languages. You are allowed one argument on the first line, BTW, for things like sed and awk that need -f or such to tolerate commands from a file.

@ DGPickett, could you explain what this construct does,
Relative to the code posted. I just don't get it.

TIA.

There are three ways to get stdout strings into a variable, and the back-quotes is the oldest, but I like it least, as there is no symmetry check in vi, or nesting. So, unless I am writing for bourne sh, I never say '`'.

The $(command) introduced with ksh allows vi % symmetry checking and allows nesting. (Be careful to use balanced paren pairs (...) in 'case $var in' cases!)

However, the simplest thing for simple values, not multi-line and not preserving whitespace, is just '| read var'. It introduces no nesting.

For lists in to lists on command line: '| xargs -n999 command '

For lists to get individual processing: '| while read var ; do ... ; done'