Question

I am trying to compile a big project, which involves me going to different directories and compiling things there.
I have three arrays, all of them contain commands, first array contains directory traversal, second array contains compile commands, and third array contains error messages.

I set up my arrays like so

task[0]="cd vssl/make/; make clean;"
compile[0]="make all"
error[0]="echo \"We failed at vssl install\""

task[1]="cd ../../web/make/; make clean;"
compile[1]="make install"
error[1]="echo \"We failed at web install\""

Now I need a for loop that will work like this

for i in {0..$size_of_array}
do
    eval ${task[$i]}
    if (eval ${compile[$i]}); then
        echo "Done"
    else
        eval ${error[$i]}
        break
    fi
done

I have tried a lot of things, and not sure how to achieve it. for i in "${task[@]}" doesn’t work for me either because I have three variables. Would anyone have any insight on how to get around this?

Thanks to anyone who can help. 🙂

Answer 1

The size of the task array is ${#task[@]} (lovely syntax, eh?). So you can start your loop as

for ((i=0; i<${#task[@]}; ++i))

See the for command and the section on ARITHMETIC EVALUATION in bash(1) for details.