Shell scripting gotchas

• If strange behavior is encountered running an existing (working) script, your default shell may differ.  At the top of the script, you may need to explicitly set your shell, e.g. change #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash
• Whitespace is very important to the declaration of variables, that is:

numSections = 0;

attempts to execute a command named numSections whereas

numSections=0;

declares a variable of name numSections 

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