A simple but urgent query -- I will be very grateful if you advise please. I am writing a script xyz.ksh. It can be run in two modes:- 1) without any parameters. 2) with a tablename as xyz.ksh -s table_name I am using while getopts s:s table_name do case $table_name in s) TABLE_NAME=$$OPTARG;; done The problem I am having is if someone is running by mistake "xyz.ksh -s" that is with the parameter but without the value I am being unable to throw an exception. Please can you advise. Sujoy Roychowdhury BI Consultant

Simple IF shold fix that if [[ $2 != "" ]];then print $1 $2 else print Missing an argument, stupid fi

Another way would be to check the number of command line arguments which should be either 0 or 2 as in the following ksh code snipet: [[ $# != 0 && $# != 2 ]] && { echo "invalid syntax" exit 1 } [[ $# ==2 && "$1 != "-s" ]] && { echo "invalid command line argument: $1" }