UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm having problems with bash scripts. If a bash script is called with no arguments, I always get "PHIST=!" as the first argument (i.e. this is what $1 equals). Why? Where does this come from, and how can I fix it? Nothing in the bash man pages refer to this mysterious default argument.

That is very strange. I would say it's not supposed to be there. Try the following:

Code:

set -v -x

Now invoke the script. Post the output.

Thanks for the reply, but I found the problem.

My environment variable BASH_ENV was set to my bash resource file. This means that non-interactive scripts are going to call my bash resource file when they are executed. It turns out that my bash resource file was calling a common bash resource file that was supplied by someone on our project for everyone to use. It is suppose to provide some basic settings. Unfortunately this common resource file was patterned after a common csh resource file for our csh users. The problem was that some of the set commands in the csh file were not changed appropriately for the bash file. The last of these set commands was the following...

set PHIST=!

This is strictly a csh setting anyway. However, according to the bash man page, any remaining arguments after the options are processed (and you can see there were no options in this command) are treated as values for the positional parameters, and are assigned accordingly. Therefore, $1 was set to PHIST=!.