teammatt3 — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:43:36 +0000

Ok, that makes sense. Knowing that, I used it in my script. I made a new function called cutit and...well, I don't want to explain it. Have a look yourself . That is my final script (maybe ). I think I got everything working the way it's supposed to.

Thanks again for the help, we never covered functions in the class (not in the book either).

EDIT: Changed it again, combined grep and cut together in a function. Man, I love scripting.

Abhishek Reddy — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:44:19 +0000

There's a somewhat silly reason why you can't do that, and a good reason why you shouldn't.

[incode]$1[/incode] basically means the first argument. At the top level it's, the first argument to the script; but inside a function it's the first argument to the function. To read the script's first argument from a function, either copy the script's first argument to another variable -- which you have -- or pass it as an argument to your function.

I would use another variable (like [incode]lastname[/incode]), as it's better style and more maintainable. The program logic is separated from the its interface. It's also more readable.