KSH script arguments

[Rob McMahon]

In article <1992 at hsi86.hsi.UUCP> kenney at hsi.com (Brian Kenney) writes:
>In article <b4CC02oVc3Jx01 at amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> jonc at amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Jonathan Chang) writes:
> 
>>How can I extract the last argument to a ksh script?
>>Example:
>>	myscript arg1 arg2 arg3
>
>args=$*
>arg3=${args##* }
>
>You're welcome.

Of course this breaks horribly if the last argument contains a space.
(Actually it doesn't work at all with bash, you need to escape the ` ' with a
`\', is this a bug ?)

This is one of my pet peeves.  People create files with spaces in their names
(often from packages), and I like to be able to tell them "Don't panic, just
surround the names with ''", I don't want to have to say "If you're using x or
y you can use '', but you can't use this with z because it's a shell script,
although of course it does work with w because it's a csh script."  People
shouldn't have to know how things are implemented.  (Yes, yes, I know, I
should say "just don't create files with spaces in the name :-(, but that
doesn't work for messages, the title of printer jobs, etc.)

Rob
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Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England