Question

I have a script where i have defined two arrays. Now depending on the array name passed (as parameter), i want to process the same in the function below. Earlier, i wasn’t even getting any element in variable ‘ARRAY’ until i used ${!}

Now the problem is that when i am printing the array content (or the number of elements in that array), i am getting only the first element.

Any suggestions?

Script:

#!/bin/bash

APP=$1

process_data() {
    ARRAY="${!1}"
    echo "No of array elements: ${#ARRAY[@]}"
    echo "Array content: ${ARRAY[@]}"
}


ORADATA=(
"oraserver/content:abcDaily/ORAServer/"
"oraserver/w3s-ix86:abcDaily/ORAServer/"
)

SQLDATA=(
"sqlserver/content:abcDaily/SQLServer/"
"sqlserver/w3s-ix86:abcDaily/SQLServer/"
)

process_data ${APP[@]}

Command:

-bash-2.05b$ ./testarray.sh ORADATA

Output:

No of array elements: 1
Array content: oraserver/content:abcDaily/ORAServer/

Answer 1

Here’s a version without eval (so it handles shell metacharacters in the array values properly):

#!/bin/bash

APP=$1

process_data() {
    ARRAYVAR="$1[@]"   # This just textually appends "[@]" to $1
    ARRAY=("${!ARRAYVAR}")   # Use indirect expansion to get contents of array, store as new array
    echo "No of array elements: ${#ARRAY[@]}"
    echo "Array content: ${ARRAY[@]}"
}


ORADATA=(
"oraserver/content:abcDaily/ORAServer/"
"oraserver/w3s-ix86:abcDaily/ORAServer/"
)

SQLDATA=(
"sqlserver/content:abcDaily/SQLServer/"
"sqlserver/w3s-ix86:abcDaily/SQLServer/"
)

process_data $APP   # Note that APP is not an array, so the [@] bit was irrelevant

Example:

$ ./testarray.sh ORADATA
No of array elements: 2
Array content: oraserver/content:abcDaily/ORAServer/ oraserver/w3s-ix86:abcDaily/ORAServer/