How to merge two arrays in a zipper like fashion in Bash?

Question

I am trying to merge two arrays into one in a zipper like fashion. I have difficulty to make that happen.

array1=(one three five seven)
array2=(two four six          


        

Answer 1

< Update >This below solution is designed to work with data delimited by newlines: each value to be loaded into the array on a separate line in each file. Works perfectly as written, but if your data is organized differently, please see @Socowi 's alternative using paste with printf in the comments. Much thanks to @Socowi for both raising the issue & offering a workaround for data delimited in other ways! < / Update >

Here's another solution to interleave data from (2) arrays which are populated with data delimited by newlines in separate files. This solution uses paste, echo & xargs:

Array Data: I feed files to arrays because I like to disaggregate data from code. Following files with each value delimited by a newline will be consumed by readarray:

test1.txt:

one
three
five
seven

test2.txt:

two
four
six
eight

Put it all together:

#!/bin/bash

readarray arrayTest1 < /root/test1.txt
readarray arrayTest2 < /root/test2.txt

paste <( echo "${arrayTest1[*]}" ) <( echo "${arrayTest2[*]}" ) | xargs

Output:

one two three four five six seven eight