http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide is the ultimate bash guide, along with http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ http://mywik

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide is the ultimate bash guide, along with http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ For learning the differences between POSIX sh and bash (which can trip you up if you want to run on systems without bash, or if you simply don't know that #!/bin/sh is different from #!/bin/bash), see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism And regarding how to parse your example, the $* in a string expands to all input parameters to the function, separated by the first character of the IFS variable (e.g. space).