Sometimes you want a script that will step through the command-line arguments
one by one.
(The
"$@"
parameter (
44.15
)
gives you all of them at once.)
The Bourne shell
for
loop can do this.
The
for
loop looks like this:
for arg in
list
do
...
handle $arg
...
done
If you omit the
in
list
, the loop steps through the command-line arguments.
It puts the first command-line argument in
arg
(or whatever
else you choose to call the
shell variable (
6.8
)
),
then executes the commands from
do
to
done
.
Then it puts the next command-line argument in
arg
, does the loop...
and so on... ending the loop after handling all the arguments.
For an example of a
for
loop, let's hack on the
zpg
(
44.12
)
script.
case
|
#!/bin/sh
# zpg - UNCOMPRESS FILE(S), DISPLAY WITH pg
# Usage: zpg [pg options] file [...files]
stat=1 # DEFAULT EXIT STATUS; RESET TO 0 BEFORE NORMAL EXIT
temp=/tmp/zpg$$
trap 'rm -f $temp; exit $stat' 0
trap 'echo "`basename $0`: Ouch! Quitting early..." 1>&2' 1 2 15
files= switches=
for arg
do
case "$arg" in
-*) switches="$switches $arg" ;;
*) files="$files $arg" ;;
esac
done
case "$files" in
"") echo "Usage: `basename $0` [pg options] file [files]" 1>&2 ;;
*) for file in $files
do gzcat "$file" | pg $switches
done
stat=0
;;
esac
|
We added a
for
loop to get and check each command-line argument.
For example, let's say that a user typed:
%
zpg -n afile ../bfile
The first pass through the
for
loop,
$arg
is
-n
.
Because the argument starts with a minus sign (
-
),
the
case
treats it as an option.
Now the
switches
variable is replaced by its previous contents
(an empty string), a space, and
-n
.
Control goes to the
esac
and the loop repeats
with the next argument.
The next argument,
afile
, doesn't look like an option.
So now the
files
variable will contain a space and
afile
.
The loop starts over once more, with
../bfile
in
$arg
.
Again, this looks like a file, so now
$files
has
afile ../bfile
.
Because
../bfile
was the last argument, the loop ends;
$switches
has the options and
$files
has all the other arguments.
Next, we added another
for
loop.
This one has the word
in
followed by
$files
,
so the loop steps through the contents of
$files
.
The loop runs
gzcat
on each file, piping it to
pg
with any switches
you gave.
Note that
$switches
isn't
quoted (
8.14
)
.
This way, if
$switches
is empty, the shell won't pass an empty
argument to
pg
.
Also, if
$switches
has more than one switch, the shell will break the
switches into separate arguments at the spaces and pass them individually to
pg
.
You can use a
for
loop with any space-separated (actually,
IFS (
35.21
)
-separated)
list of words - not just filenames.
You don't have to use a shell variable as the list;
you can use
command substitution (
9.16
)
(backquotes),
shell wildcards (
15.2
)
,
or just "hardcode" the list of words:
-
lpr
|
for person in Joe Leslie Edie Allan
do
echo "Dear $person," | cat - form_letter | lpr
done
|
The
getopt
and
getopts
(
44.18
)
commands handle command-line arguments in a more standard way than
for
loops.