At symbol bash

@ is considered a special variable in bash for expansion. $@ expands to all the positional arguments, starting from one.

* symbol

* is similar to @, they both expand to all the arguments. However, @ is almost always used over * since it preserves breaks.

Given the arguments "apple banana" "pomegranate orange"

• "$@" would expand to "apple banana" "pomegranate orange"
• "$*" would expand to "apple banana pomegranate orange"

Example

That is, for a given command:

./shop.sh apple banana

The arguments are:

• $0, "./shop.sh"
• $1, "apple"
• $2, "banana"

And $@ would expand to "apple banana".

See Special Parameters - Bash Reference Manual

Arguments after Nth

For the first example command ./shop.sh apple banana, to get only arguments after "apple":

further_processing "${@:2}"

To skip an argument, use the shift builtin:

# shop.sh
echo "First item: $1"

shift 1

echo "Remaining items: $@"

This would output:

$ ./shop.sh apple banana pomegranate
First item: apple
Remaining items: banana pomegranate

You can also use shift to iterate over arguments:

while (( "$#" )); do
    # Buy what's next on the list
    buy "$1"

    # Shift the arguments down
    shift
done

See shift(1p) - Linux manual page See The shift built-in