I feel stupid -- determine the full path to a file

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Andrew McNabb on Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:57:03 CST:

> argument_list="arg1 arg2 arg3"
> some_program $argument_list
> 
> Unfortunately,  I could  find  no  way to  execute  a  program with  a
> variable length list of arguments. The following works, but requires a
> fixed number of arguments:

How about something like:

set "arg1" "arg2" "arg3"
some_program "$@"

Here's  a  fun  little  script that  demonstrates  this  by  dynamically
altering the arguments (decreasing them as it goes):

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" -gt 0 ]
then
  echo "$# args are: $@"
  shift
  if [ "$#" -ne 0 ]
  then
    set "$@"
  fi

  "$0" "$@"
fi
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Call it as: 

./shellscript "arg 1" "arg 2" "arg 3" "arg 4" "arg 5"

This will run 5 times (only 5 arguments) and output five lines.

Of course  if your  original script uses  the positional  parameters you
will want to save them off first.

Cheers,

Andy
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