Question

I have some code that creates a variable of some name automatically and assigns some value to it. The code is something like the following:

myVariableName="zappo"
eval "${myVariableName}=zappo_value"

How would I access the value of this variable using the automatically generated name of the variable? So, I’m looking for some code a bit like the following (but working):

eval "echo ${${myVariableName}}"

(… which may be used in something such as myVariableValue=”$(eval “echo ${${myVariableName}}”)”…).

Thanks muchly for any assistance

If you think this approach is madness and want offer more general advice, the general idea I’m working on is having variables defined in functions in a library with such names as ${usage} and ${prerequisiteFunctions}. These variables that are defined within functions would be accessed by an interrogation function that can, for instance, ensure that prerequisites etc. are installed. So a loop within this interrogation function is something like this:

for currentFunction in ${functionList}; do
    echo "function: ${currentFunction}"
    ${currentFunction} -interrogate # (This puts the function variables into memory.)
    currentInterrogationVariables="${interrogationVariables}" # The variable interrogationVariables contains a list of all function variables available for interrogation.
    for currentInterrogationVariable in ${currentInterrogationVariables}; do
        echo "content of ${currentInterrogationVariable}:"
        eval "echo ${${currentInterrogationVariable}}"
    done
done

Thanks again for any ideas!

Answer 1

IIRC, indirection in bash is by !, so try ${!myVariableName}