Bash Scripting: Tip of the Day!

I know that we all love and hate shell scripting. Bash can be the best friend in the world at times, then the worst enemy a second later. While working on a parsing script today, I came across a problem where I wanted to be able to pass an argument to a shell script, then use that argument in some processing. The only problem was, I needed to be able to pass arguments that had multiple words and spaces! I have come across this problem before and worked around it, but today I decided to solve the problem and figure out how to work with it.

In order to pass an argument to a shell script on the command line that is not all one word, you must enclose the command line argument in single quotes and the $1 variable in the code in double quotes. An example:

myEcho.sh
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#!/bin/bash

echo "$1"

Execution:
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non-root@localhost$> ./myEcho.sh 'hello my loyal blog readers'
hello my loyal blog readers

I hope that this tip helps someone looking for the same thing.