Question

I’m trying to collect string values in a bash script. What’s the simplest way that I can append string values to a list or array structure such that I can echo them out at the end?

Answer 1

$ arr=(1 2 3)
$ arr+=(4)
$ echo ${arr[@]}
1 2 3 4

Since Bash uses sparse arrays, you shouldn’t use the element count ${#arr} as an index. You can however, get an array of indices like this:

$ indices=(${!arr[@]})