Hi, > I write and use bash scripts almost daily,
I did not know that you were tired and thus did not come to the idea of a script yourself. So you got the mini starter for scripters. My programs are similarly unusable as enscript if one does not develop their serious jobs in scripts. > The only additional thing > for which I had to google was the procedure for modifying PATH. What did you add there ? I would have rather moved the script to one of the directories which were already listed in PATH. Or staid with the inconvenience to always prepend "~/" to its name. > needed to include the rest of the command line (the file name); I was > not sure that that could be done in bash. We have a wide variety of variable parameters in bash. Execute man bash, search for "Positional Parameters" and also read the next chapter "Special Parameters". If you just want to forward all arguments unchanged to enscript, then replace "$1" by "$@" (with quotation marks). The form "$@" makes least trouble with blanks or special characters in the arguments. Play with this test script ~/my_test: #!/bin/bash for i in "$@" do echo ">>> $i <<<" done Give it something to gnaw on ~/my_test a 'b B' 'New line' should put out >>> a <<< >>> b B <<< >>> New line <<< You may also send named parameters to a script: file=/my/file/name ~/my_script ...maybe.some.arguments... to be used inside the script as variable by prefix "$" and typically inside "-quotes to keep blanks from splitting words: #!/bin/bash echo "file : $file" This should put out with above run file : /my/file/name Then there are the exported variables export file=/my/file/name ... maybe other shell commands ... ~/my_script ... The script will then know the variable content of "$file". Be aware that Debian by default uses /bin/dash for executing shell scripts, if they start by #!/bin/sh dash offers less extras than bash. It is desirable to stay away from "bashisms" as long as one does not really need them. So maybe it is wise to change #!/bin/bash to #!/bin/sh in order to notice when bashisms sneak into your scripting. Have a nice day :) Thomas