Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have one situation. I am developing a shell script to which parameters will be passed from a Web based User Interface using some Business Process(BP).There are some 6 parameters for which user will enter the values in UI. These values will be passed to script by BP in the form - <parameter_name>, <value>. Out of 6, atleast one parameter is Mandatory to enter. My difficulty is how to access these parameter values. I thought of something like this. --

If [[echo $* | cut -f1 -d, == "PLANT"]]; then
PLANT=`echo $* | cut -f2 -d , `
fi

If [[echo $* | cut -f1 -d, == "DIRECTION"]]; then
DIRECTION=`echo $* | cut -f2 -d , `
fi

But, here my doubt is after the script identified that the string before (,) in any one parameter is PLANT, how is it going to identify the value after that comma & store in variable PLANT. It might also happen that it may take value in any other parameter after comma & store in PLANT variable as '$*' implies any parameter passed to the script.

I am not able to understand what logic to implement. Please help.

One good way is to use getopts with a case statement, rather than trying to find things blindly. If a parm is required, then in the case that matches it, set a variable like REQUIRED=1, so you can test for it later on.

Can you please elaborete further ?

My requirement is like - if I find the string "PLANT" in one of the parameters which is coming in the format as - PLANT,<value> then I should take the <value> ( which is coming immediately after PLANT string with (,) as delimiter between them ) & store it in one variable known as PLANT.

It seems simple but due to the problem which I specified above , it will definitely fail. So, I need to implement some different logic.

If you think getopts will work in this case, can you please explain with example ?

Thanks.