Question

Two things, first this is my first question in this forum and I do apologise if the formating is all over the place. Second I have not written that many bash scripts, and it tend to be quite a long time between the scripts I produce.

That said, here is my question.

Is it possible to do something like this in bash (Clear array $array contains):
$array=()

Basically this is what I would like to do. I have a variable with array variable names in it:

array1=()  
array2=()  
arrayList="array1 array2"  


# In a function far far away
for array in $arrayList
do  
    eval arr=("\"\${$array[@]\"")  

    for index in ${!arr[@]}
    do
        echo "${arr[$index]}"
    done
    # Here is the big "?", I like to clear the array that $array refers to.
    $array=()  
done

My arrays contain strings that include “” (space) and this is why I use the eval statement. Not sure it’s needed but at least it’s working. The script is more or less working as I want it too, but I need to clear the arrays in the $arrayList, and I rather not hardcode it somewhere, even though that would be easy.

Answer 1

Probably the simplest thing to do is just unset them. An unset variable will act identically to an empty array in most contexts, and unset $array ought to work fine.