[wellylug] arrays in bash?

[Grant McLean]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 13:27 +1200, Sigurd Magnusson wrote:
> SilverStripe
> how do iterate of an array in bash?

Whilst technically I'm sure it's possible, why not just write the script
in a more appropriate language.  I have a rule of thumb that if my
script is longer than 5 lines I rewrite it as Perl.  The frustrations of
trying to achieve anything non-trivial in bash will inevitably drive me
to it anyway.

Like any rule-of-thumb, I break that rule occasionally (eg: for init.d
scripts that are essentially just a big case statement).  However I
often end up with 20-30 lines of convoluted bash code and kick myself
for not switching sooner.

> e.g. can someone change this psuedocode into bash... :)
> 
> myarray = ("fish", "yuck"),
> ("chocolate", "yum"),
> ("icecream", "yum")

That's not an array, that's a hash.  Only a PHP code could think that
was an array :-)

> for food in $myarray; do
> echo I think that $food is $myarray[$food]
> done

If you're familiar with PHP, then why not write the script in PHP and
change the first line to:

#!/usr/bin/php

Cheers
Grant