Question

I’m trying to store the files listing into an array and then loop through the array again.
Below is what I get when I run ls -ls command from the console.

total 40
36 -rwxrwxr-x 1 amit amit 36720 2012-03-31 12:19 1.txt
4 -rwxrwxr-x 1 amit amit  1318 2012-03-31 14:49 2.txt

The following bash script I’ve written to store the above data into a bash array.

i=0
ls -ls | while read line
do
    array[ $i ]="$line"        
    (( i++ ))
done

But when I echo $array, I get nothing!

FYI, I run the script this way: ./bashscript.sh

Answer 1

Try with:

#! /bin/bash

i=0
while read line
do
    array[ $i ]="$line"        
    (( i++ ))
done < <(ls -ls)

echo ${array[1]}

In your version, the while runs in a subshell, the environment variables you modify in the loop are not visible outside it.

(Do keep in mind that parsing the output of ls is generally not a good idea at all.)