According to both the dash man page and the POSIX spec, "When the shell is invoked, OPTIND is initialized to 1." However, it actually takes the value of the environment variable if it exists: $ OPTIND=4 dash -c 'echo "$OPTIND"' 4 $ OPTIND=4 bash -c 'echo "$OPTIND"' 1 $ OPTIND=4 ksh -c 'echo "$OPTIND"' 1 $ OPTIND=4 ksh93 -c 'echo "$OPTIND"' 1 -- Chris F.A. Johnson, <http://cfajohnson.com/> Author: Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell (2009, Apress) Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html