bash shell script accessing array variables

The bash shell allows a number of methods for accessing elements of variable arrays. This recipe demonstrates some of these techniques.

Given the array defined by the following code:


The individual elements in the array can be accessed by their numeric index (remember that they start counting a zero) with:


All of the elements can be accessed at the same time (which is useful in a for loop) with the following:


The number of elements in the array can be obtained with:


A range of elements can easily be specified with the following syntax:


The first example starts at element 2 (the third element) and returns the next three elements (:2:3). The second example starts at record 3 and returns all of the remaining records (:3).