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 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$2c..." (where c is the first char of IFS).
You almost always want "$@". Same goes for "${arr[@]}".
Always quote them!
Just quote the argument to echo:
( IFS=$'\n'; echo "${my_array[*]}" ) the sub shell helps restoring the IFS after use
Using for:
for each in "${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[@]}" I 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.
Another useful variant is pipe to tr:
echo ${my_array[@]} | tr " " "\n"
This looks simple and compact