This has probably been asked before, but I'm not sure how to search for it, so here goes:

I've written a shell script, which takes input from the user. It runs fine. However, it prompts the user for information, eg:
This is fine, but I now want to use it with cron, so I need to be able to pass parameters in the following manner:
Can someone point me in the right direction for some documentation on how to accomplish this?

Thanks.

Doing "--host=localhost" is unnecessary unless you've got multiple requirements for this script so that it can take in options other than the hostname.

You can just do: myscript.sh localhost

Anything passed at the command line becomes a positional variable starting at 1. So the above is sending a variable called $1 into your script.

Since positional parameters can actually be changed depending on what you are doing the first thing you'd want to do in the script is store what was passed in into another variable that doesn't change:

HOST=$1

From then on you could get "localhost" by referencing $HOST.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/othertypesv.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/extmisc.html#GETOPTY

Some reading material for you Not too difficult to do.

Sorry, forgot to mention that there would be more than one variable being passed.

Thanks for those links. I'll check them out!

You can do more than one variable the way I wrote it. The second one would be $2, the third would be $3 etc...

Creating options flags would be something you'd do if you want to have different choices each time. (e.g. --host to specify host or --user to specify user and invocations where you intend to sometimes specify ONLY the user or ONLY the host. If you're specifying both user and host every time then doing it without the --host and --user would be the way to go).

Yep, I'll be using different choices each time, as the prompts at the moment can be left empty.