i just learned that when you use getopts, the argument after an option is stored in $OPTARG variable. how about if i have more than 1 arguments? if i'm not mistaken, $OPTARG gets 1 only. how can i get the other arguments?

Correct, only one argument at a time is stored in $OPTARG. getopts needs to be ran within a loop, and each execution of getopts will process just one option: #!/bin/ksh optiona=n optionb=n optionc=n while getopts d:u:abc opt do print "opt=$opt OPTARG=$OPTARG" case $opt in d) database=$OPTARG;; u) username=$OPTARG;; a) optiona=y;; b) optionb=y;; c) optionc=y;; *) print "Valid syntax is ..." exit;; esac done shift $((OPTIND -1)) print "\nProcessing options are:" print "database=$database" print "username=$username" print "option a: $optiona" print "option b: $optionb" print "option c: $optionc" print "files to be processed: $*" exit 0 And following is a sample execution. Note that after shifting the parameters out of the way, this leaves only the filenames on the command line: myscript -dPROD1 -uJBoothe -ac file1 file2 file3 opt=d OPTARG=PROD1 opt=u OPTARG=JBoothe opt=a OPTARG= opt=c OPTARG= Processing options are: database=PROD1 username=JBoothe option a: y option b: n option c: y files to be processed: file1 file2 file3