Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi everyone,
Can someone possibly help me with this problem I am having please.
I wrote a Korn shell script to manipulate currency amounts in a way that a person could use this script to determine the minimum number of coins required to make a certain amount.

for example when entered on the command line:
$coins 5.67
the script will break the amount down to the minimum number of coins (toonies, loonies, quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies) totaling 5.67.
the problem is that I can't get rid of $ if entered before the amount on the command line, cos' the shell takes it as the command line argument.
I tried using sed to omit $ from the amount, so when I enter
$coins $5.67
the out put of sed is:
67
not 5.67

Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Bashir

Is just using single quotes an option? Or a backslash, but that's uglier and probably harder for a user to remember...

> coins '$5.67'
> coins \$5.67

The problem is that the interactive shell that is accepting the command line will treat $ specially. This happens before it even locates your coins script. Quoting the $ is an option.

Another option is to prompt the user for input and then read it yourself. And to strip off a dollar sign, you don't need sed when you're using ksh...

#! /usr/bin/ksh

print -n "Enter amount - "
read amt
print amt is $amt
amt=${amt#$}
print amt is $amt
exit