No, I’m not referring to your coworkers fighting over which version of Linux is the best or even what command is most helpful on the command line. Instead, I’m referring to the arguments that you use on the command line or within scripts to get Unix to do specific work for you.

The things that you want to do with arguments when working with scripts include:

• verifying that arguments were provided
• checking that the provided arguments are valid
• assigning arguments to variables when it makes them easier to use or makes the script more readable

We also need to watch out for those occasions when you might run into the “argument list too long” error.

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