Re: [vox-tech] bash question

["Stephen M. Helms" <mytho_x@pacbell.neMAPSt>]

Hi Bill,

Try

echo $PICK

William Kendrick wrote:

> I'm trying to write a simple shell script which takes in a list of
> arguments and then picks one randomly and spits it out.
> 
> In otherwords, if you run:
> 
>   ./random.sh Hello World How Are You
> 
> You will sometimes get the word "Hello", sometimes "You", sometimes "How", etc.
> 
> 
> Picking the random number is pretty simple:
> 
> 
>   PICK=`expr $RANDOM % $#`
> 
> (pick an entirely random number, and then MOD it by the number of arguments
> sent to the program, thus getting a number between 0 and num_args - 1)
> 
> 
> My problem is being able to spit out an arbitrary argument.
> 
> In otherwords, if "$PICK" is 3, I want to spit out $3 (the 3rd.. err 4th?
> argument sent to the program)
> 
> 
> I've tried things like:
> 
>   echo $$PICK
>   echo $($PICK)
>   echo ${$PICK}
> 
> and so forth...
> 
> 
> Before I bang my head over the man pages for bash, I thought I'd just
> ask and see if anyone here could give me the magic incantation. ;)
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -bill!
> 
>