How to define a shell script with variable number of arguments?

Question

I would like to define a simple abbreviation of a call to gs (ghostscript) via a shell script. The first argument(s) give all the files that should be merged, t

Answer 1

The bash variables $@ and $* expand into the list of command line arguments. Generally, you will want to use "$@" (that is, $@ surrounded by double quotes). This will do the right thing if someone passes your script an argument containing whitespace.

So if you had this in your script:

outputfile=$1
shift
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=$outputfile "$@"

And you called your script like this:

myscript out.pdf foo.ps bar.ps "another file.ps"

This would expand to:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=out.pdf foo.ps bar.ps "another file.ps"

Read the "Special Parameters" section of the bash man page for more information.