Question

How do I pass the entire argument list of shell script to a program?

So for instance, if I have a java program called JavaFoo that’d take any number of arguments, and this should be called inside my script.

How do I pass the script’s arguments to the java program?

Answer 1

In Bash:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
java /path/to/JavaFoo "$@"

to pass all parameters individually quoted as passed to the Bash script itself.
Works with Dash as well, but I don’t know about other Bourne-compatible shells.

Say you want to pass all but the first parameter to the shell script on to the Java program, use shift like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
shift
java /path/to/JavaFoo "$@"

Use more instances of shift to get rid of more parameters before passing them on, if needed.

So say you call the shell script (myscript) as follows:

./myscript a b c

the shift will get rid of a. Add one more shift and it also gets rid of b. The name of the script itself is not included in "$@" even though you can access it as $0 in many shells.