When doing scripting in the shell there are a few built-in variables that we can used:
$$ = The PID number of the process executing the shell. $? = Exit status variable. Nearly all Linux programs return a 0 error status for true and anything else is false. $0 = The name of the command you used to call a program. $1 = The first argument on the command line. $2 = The second argument on the command line. $n = The nth argument on the command line. n = 0-9 $* = All the arguments on the command line. $# = The number of command line arguments.