How can I access positional parameters after $9?
Use ${10} instead of $10. This works for ["BASH"] and KornShell, but not for older BourneShell implementations. Another way to access arbitrary positional parameters after $9 is to use for, e.g. to get the last parameter:
for last
do
: # nothing
done
echo "last argument is: $last"To get an argument by number, we can use a counter:
n=12 # This is the number of the argument we are interested in
i=1
for arg
do
if [ $i -eq $n ]
then
argn=$arg
break
fi
i=`expr $i + 1`
done
echo "argument number $n is: $argn"This has the advantage of not "consuming" the arguments. If this is no problem, the shift command discards the first positional arguments:
shift 11
echo "the 12th argument is: $1"Although direct access to any positional argument is possible this way, it's hardly needed. The common way is to use getopts(3) to process command line options (e.g. "-l", or "-o filename"), and then use either for or while to process all arguments in turn. An explanation of how to process command line arguments is available here: http://www.shelldorado.com/goodcoding/cmdargs.html