Morning members
Under shell scripting, what is the difference main between $@ and $* when dealing with positional parameters?
The two variables are always confusing especially when it comes to getting the total number of arguments passed to a script in terms of choosing which one to use in a shell script.
Thanks
The difference comes in how they are expanded.
$* expands to a single argument with all the elements delimited by spaces (actually the first character of $IFS).
$@ expands to multiple arguments.
For example
#!/bin/bash
echo “With :"
for arg in "$”; do echo “<$arg>”; done
echo
echo “With @:”
for arg in “$@”; do echo “<$arg>”; done
$ /tmp/test.sh 1 2 “3 4”
With *:
<1 2 3 4>
With @:
<1>
<2>
<3 4>