Chapter 6. Command-Line Option and Typed Variables

  In particular, if you are an experienced UNIX user, it might have occurred to you that none of the example scripts shown so far have the ability to handle options preceded by a dash (-) on the command line. And if you program in a conventional language like C or Pascal, you will have noticed that the only type of data that we have seen in shell variables is character strings; we haven't seen how to do arithmetic, for example.

6.1  Command-Line Options
6.2  Typed Variables
6.3  Integer Variables and Arithmetic
6.4  Arrays