Re: Indirect expansion and arrays

[Dennis Williamson]

To make your example work try:

$ b=a[*]

or

$ b=a[@]

Otherwise, your indirection is telling b to look at a as a scalar.
This would give the same result:

$ echo $a
x

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Bernd Eggink <monoped@sudrala.de> wrote:
> It seems that indirect expansion doesn't work with arrays:
>
> $ a=(x y z)
> $ b=a
> $ echo "${!b[0]} ${!b[1]} ${!b[2]}"
> x
>
> Is that intended? The documentation isn't explicit about it.
>
> IMHO it would be very desirable to have a indirect expansion facility for
> arrays. Otherwise there is only a choice between passing all elements to a
> function, which is time-consuming, or using eval, which is cumbersome and
> error-prone.
>
> Regards,
> Bernd
>
> --
> Bernd Eggink
> http://sudrala.de
>
>