[coolj]

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

TLDP's Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is a great resource for learning bash.

For example, this section talks about the meaning of "$*":

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internalvariables.html#ARGL...

[barrkel]

Free advice: you almost never want $. Almost always what you want is $@, usually in the form "$@". It doesn't matter for this example, but $ is usually a code smell.