Don't understand $1 in shell scripts

Hi,

I can't work out how to use $1 in shell scripts.

If I have a script that (say) matches filename "foo.txt", I can trigger an embedded shell script

Code: Select all: cp foo.txt bar.txt

and it all works well.

But if I try to use $1 in the script, like so:

Code: Select all: cp $1 bar.txt

then the logs show that the attempt just throws back a "usage" message for cp.

So what am I doing wrong?

(NB, this is a simplified example, I'm not really trying to use cp!)

Actually, I'd like to ask an additional question; given a filename, how do I use $1 as a reference to build a different filename?

Continuing my "it's just an example, I'm not really using cp" theme, how would I rewrite the hard-coded

Code: Select all: cp foo.txt hellofoo.txt

so that it copied bar.txt to hellobar.txt, baz.txt to hellobaz.txt, etc etc?

$1 represents the file path that is being processed. One general tip with shell scripts is to quote it like so:

cp "$1" bar.txt

That ensures if the file has spaces that it will still be considered one argument and not many (since arguments are normally separated by spaces). Not sure if that is your problem but it's something to check.

Thanks, that works! It's odd because, in this circumstance, there are no spaces in the filenames. But it works, so I'm happy... Cheers.