Loop through an array of strings in Bash?

arrays bash shell
Mo. picture Mo. · Jan 16, 2012 · Viewed 1.3M times · Source

I want to write a script that loops through 15 strings (array possibly?) Is that possible?

Something like:

for databaseName in listOfNames
then
  # Do something
end

Answer

anubhava picture anubhava · Jan 16, 2012

You can use it like this:

## declare an array variable
declare -a arr=("element1" "element2" "element3")

## now loop through the above array
for i in "${arr[@]}"
do
   echo "$i"
   # or do whatever with individual element of the array
done

# You can access them using echo "${arr[0]}", "${arr[1]}" also

Also works for multi-line array declaration

declare -a arr=("element1" 
                "element2" "element3"
                "element4"
                )

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