Question

What would be the best approach to process a call like this to my shell script?

./cars Mazda Toyota 2010 Honda BMW VW 2009

So that it prints out:

Mazda 2010

Toyota 2010

Honda 2009

BMW 2009

VW 2009

I can’t use arrays because it’s the most simple version of shell so it doesn’t support them. Any ideas?

Answer 1

#!/bin/sh

CARS=

while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
    # Cheesy way to test if $1 is a year.
    if [ "$1" -gt 0 ] 2> /dev/null; then
        YEAR=$1

        for CAR in $CARS; do
            echo $CAR $YEAR
        done

        CARS=
    else
        # Add car to list
        CARS="$CARS $1"
    fi

    # Process the next command-line argument.
    shift
done