Bash: Command Line Arguments to Bash Script Examples

Let's say you have a bash script with name script.sh with a simple hello message.

#!/bin/bash

echo "hello!"

Now if you want to have this script accept command line string arguments, you can simply add it when you run your script.

# ./script.sh Sam

You will see this prints out only "hello!" because we have not made use of the argument passed in the script, so lets modify it.

#!/bin/bash

echo "hello $1!"

Now lets run the script again by passing our 1st argument.

# ./script.sh Sam

hello Sam!

There we have it!

If you add more arguments to the bash script when executing you can access them using $2, $3, $4... and so on!

If you want to fetch the name of the script you can make use of $0

#!/bin/bash

echo "hello $1! you just executed the script: $0!"