Options are characters with a single dash before them.

Check out this example:

$ ./script1.sh -a

The -a is an option. You can check from your script if the user entered this option; if so, then your script can behave in some manner.

You can pass multiple options:

$ ./script1.sh -a -b -c

To print these options, you can use the $1, $2, and $3 variables:

#!/bin/bash
echo $1
echo $2
echo $3

We should check these options, but, since we haven't discussed conditional statements yet, we will keep it simple for now.

Options can be passed with a value, like this:

$ ./script1.sh -a -b 20 -c

Here the -b option is passed with a value of 20.