I need to be able to read a list of variables that follow certain parameters (similar to, say, mysqldump --databases db1 db2 db3)
Basically the script should be invoked like this:
./charge.sh --notify --target aig wfc msft --amount 1bln
In the script itself I need to assign "aig wfc msft" either to a single variable or create an array out of them.
What would be a good way of doing that?
I often find the shift statement to be really useful in situations like this. In a while loop, you can test for expected options in a case statement, popping argument 0 off during every iteration with shift, until you either get to the end, or the first positional parameter.
When you get to the --target argument in the loop, you can use shift, to pop it off the argument list, then in a loop, append each argument to a list (in this case $TARGET_LIST) and shift, until you get to the end of the argument list, or the next option (when '$1' starts with '-').
NOTIFY=0
AMOUNT=''
TARGET_LIST=''
while :; do
case "$1" in
-h|--help)
echo "$HELP"
exit 0
;;
--notify)
NOTIFY=1
shift
;;
--amount)
shift; AMOUNT="$1"; shift
;;
--target)
shift
while ! echo "$1" | egrep '^-' > /dev/null 2>&1 && [ ! -z "$1" ]; do
TARGET_LIST="$TARGET_LIST $1"
shift
done
;;
-*)
# Unexpected option
echo $USAGE
exit 2
;;
*)
break
;;
esac
done
If you can invoke the script like this (note the quotes):
./charge.sh --notify --target "aig wfc msft" --amount 1bln
You can assign "aig wcf msft" to a single variable.
If you cannot change the way the script is invoked and if you can guarantee that the --target option arguments are always followed by another option or other delimiter, you could grab the arguments between them and store them in a variable.
var=$(echo $* | sed -e 's/.*--target\(.*\)--.*/\1/')
