Re: Testing for a value not sent to a shell script

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

> I thought there was a $something that returned the number of arguments 
> supplied.

Yes, $# should give you the number of arguments.


> If I needed to write a script that needed to default to something if a single
> argument was omitted, what is that function?  For instance cal does current
> month and cal with 2009 does the given year.

$# would probably work for that as well.  Though, I suspect 'cal' isn't 
a shell script, it's probably a C program, and is checking argc.