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From: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: evaluating ${10} and above in sh/ksh
Message-ID: <7300@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 13 Aug 90 20:00:46 GMT
References: <514@risky.Convergent.COM>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Reply-To: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Organization: VU Dept. of Computer Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lines: 32

In article <514@risky.Convergent.COM>,
	chrisb@risky.Convergent.COM (Chris Bertin) writes:
)There doesn't seem to be a way, in sh or ksh, to evaluate $10 and higher.
)$10 and higher are evaluated as ${1}0, ${1}1, etc...
)		     instead of ${10}, ${11}, etc...

Alas...  POSIX fixes this though: ${10} will work.

)I have tried many different ways and they all fail. Do you know one
)that will work?

	set a b c d e f g h i j k l m

	argv()
	{
		shift $1 2> /dev/null
		echo "$1"
	}

	echo `argv 10 "$@"`
	echo `argv 11 "$@"`
	echo `argv 20 "$@"`

Beware of "$@": many shells will expand it to a single null string if
there are no positional parameters present at all!  A safe workaround
is:
	${1+"$@"}

Check it out in the manual!
--
   "UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because
    that policy would also keep them from doing clever things."  (Doug Gwyn)