writing bourne shell scripts, want to check for existance of command line params. try [ -z $1 ] which should tell me if the first command line param is empty. however all i get is "test: argument expected" when the param is not there. no good. annoying. discover bourne shell has a reserved var for the number of arguments passed, looking much like perl's - $#. so accomplish it by a simple [ $# -ne 1]. simple when you know how.