How do I print the array element of a Bash array on separate lines? This one works, but surely there is a better way:
$ my_array=(one two three) $ for i in ${my_array[@]}; do echo $i; done one two three Tried this one but it did not work:
$ IFS=$'\n' echo ${my_array[*]} one two three 7 Answers
Try doing this :
$ printf '%s\n' "${my_array[@]}" The difference between $@ and $*:
Unquoted, the results are unspecified. In Bash, both expand to separate args and then wordsplit and globbed.
Quoted,
"$@"expands each element as a separate argument, while"$*"expands to the args merged into one argument:"$1c$2c..."(wherecis the first char ofIFS).
You almost always want "$@". Same goes for "${arr[@]}".
Always quote them!
15Just quote the argument to echo:
( IFS=$'\n'; echo "${my_array[*]}" ) the sub shell helps restoring the IFS after use
9Using for:
for each in "${alpha[@]}" do echo "$each" done Using history; note this will fail if your values contain !:
history -p "${alpha[@]}" Using basename; note this will fail if your values contain /:
basename -a "${alpha[@]}" Using shuf; note that results might not come out in order:
shuf -e "${alpha[@]}" Another useful variant is pipe to tr:
echo "${my_array[@]}" | tr ' ' '\n'
This looks simple and compact
3I tried the answers here in a giant for...if loop, but didn't get any joy - so I did it like this, maybe messy but did the job:
# EXP_LIST2 is iterated # imagine a for loop EXP_LIST="List item" EXP_LIST2="$EXP_LIST2 \n $EXP_LIST" done echo -e $EXP_LIST2 although that added a space to the list, which is fine - I wanted it indented a bit. Also presume the "\n" could be printed in the original $EP_LIST.
1You could use a Bash C Style For Loop to do what you want.
my_array=(one two three) for ((i=0; i < ${#my_array[@]}; i++ )); do echo "${my_array[$i]}"; done one two three I've discovered that you can use eval to avoid using a subshell. Thus:
IFS=$'\n' eval 'echo "${my_array[*]}"' 
