How do I escape $# in shell scripting?

KDE4me · 06-24-2003, 04:13 AM

Hi,
I've tried to search for this on google and this site's search engine but they all can't recognize these characters so ...

I'm trying to test for how many parameters a command line argument is given and I use

if [ $# -eq 1 ]
then ...

anyway when I do this in vi & bash they don't recognize everything after #. Is there some way to escape this?

Thanks.

jharris · 06-24-2003, 04:51 AM

The following works for me

Code:

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# == 1 ]; then
  echo "Met condition"
fi

Code:

[jh@e128 jh]$ ./test.sh
[jh@e128 jh]$ ./test.sh bla
Met condition

HTH

Jamie...

apeekaboo · 06-25-2003, 05:26 PM

Don't know why it doesn't work. It works for me...
Are you sure the $# is the problem?
Usually I always quote the variables in my tests, even though it's not always necessary.
I just saves me some hassle whenever it does matter...

Code:

if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then
        echo "you gave 1 argument"
fi

You could test your script by executing it with 'bash -x ./scriptname' to see what really happens.

turnip · 06-25-2003, 10:35 PM

vi will see the # as a comment. It will still run as a shell script. I see this all the time in my scripts editing them in vi