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You can get the number of arguments from the special parameter $# . Value of 0 means "no arguments". $# is read-only. When used in conjunction with shift for argument processing, the special parameter $# is decremented each time Bash Builtin shift is executed.
NUM} ) in the 2^32 range, so there is a hard limit somewhere (might vary on your machine), but Bash is so slow once you get above 2^20 arguments, that you will hit a performance limit well before you hit a hard limit.
We are using the $# command to get the total number of arguments passed to the script file.
There are multiple ways to show script usage inside of your Bash script. One way is to check if the user has supplied the -h or --help options as arguments as seen below. #!/bin/bash # check whether user had supplied -h or --help .
The number of arguments is $#
Search for it on this page to learn more: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internalvariables.html#ARGLIST
#!/bin/bash
echo "The number of arguments is: $#"
a=${@}
echo "The total length of all arguments is: ${#a}: "
count=0
for var in "$@"
do
echo "The length of argument '$var' is: ${#var}"
(( count++ ))
(( accum += ${#var} ))
done
echo "The counted number of arguments is: $count"
echo "The accumulated length of all arguments is: $accum"
to add the original reference:
You can get the number of arguments from the special parameter $#. Value of 0 means "no arguments". $# is read-only.
When used in conjunction with shift for argument processing, the special parameter $# is decremented each time Bash Builtin shift is executed.
see Bash Reference Manual in section 3.4.2 Special Parameters:
"The shell treats several parameters specially. These parameters may only be referenced"
and in this section for keyword $# "Expands to the number of positional parameters in decimal."
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