How to pass an associative array as argument to a function in Bash?

Question

How do you pass an associative array as an argument to a function? Is this possible in Bash?

The code below is not working as expected:

function iter         


        

Answer 1

Here is a solution I came up with today using eval echo ... to do the indirection:

print_assoc_array() {
    local arr_keys="\${!$1[@]}" # \$ means we only substitute the $1
    local arr_val="\${$1[\"\$k\"]}"
    for k in $(eval echo $arr_keys); do #use eval echo to do the next substitution
        printf "%s: %s\n" "$k" "$(eval echo $arr_val)"
    done
}

declare -A my_arr
my_arr[abc]="123"
my_arr[def]="456"
print_assoc_array my_arr

Outputs on bash 4.3:

def: 456
abc: 123