A confusion about ${array[*]} versus ${array[@]} in the context of a bash completion

Question

I\'m taking a stab at writing a bash completion for the first time, and I\'m a bit confused about about the two ways of dereferencing bash arrays (${array[@]} a

Answer 1

Your title asks about ${array[@]} versus ${array[*]} but then you ask about $array[*] versus $array[@] which is a bit confusing. I'll answer both:

When you quote an array variable and use @ as a subscript, each element of the array is expanded to its full content regardless of whitespace (actually, one of $IFS) that may be present within that content. When you use the asterisk (*) as the subscript (regardless of whether it's quoted or not) it may expand to new content created by breaking up each array element's content at $IFS.

Here's the example script:

#!/bin/sh

myarray[0]="one"
myarray[1]="two"
myarray[3]="three four"

echo "with quotes around myarray[*]"
for x in "${myarray[*]}"; do
        echo "ARG[*]: '$x'"
done

echo "with quotes around myarray[@]"
for x in "${myarray[@]}"; do
        echo "ARG[@]: '$x'"
done

echo "without quotes around myarray[*]"
for x in ${myarray[*]}; do
        echo "ARG[*]: '$x'"
done

echo "without quotes around myarray[@]"
for x in ${myarray[@]}; do
        echo "ARG[@]: '$x'"
done

And here's it's output:

with quotes around myarray[*]
ARG[*]: 'one two three four'
with quotes around myarray[@]
ARG[@]: 'one'
ARG[@]: 'two'
ARG[@]: 'three four'
without quotes around myarray[*]
ARG[*]: 'one'
ARG[*]: 'two'
ARG[*]: 'three'
ARG[*]: 'four'
without quotes around myarray[@]
ARG[@]: 'one'
ARG[@]: 'two'
ARG[@]: 'three'
ARG[@]: 'four'

I personally usually want "${myarray[@]}". Now, to answer the second part of your question, ${array[@]} versus $array[@].

Quoting the bash docs, which you quoted:

The braces are required to avoid conflicts with the shell's filename expansion operators.

$ myarray=
$ myarray[0]="one"
$ myarray[1]="two"
$ echo ${myarray[@]}
one two

But, when you do $myarray[@], the dollar sign is tightly bound to myarray so it is evaluated before the [@]. For example:

$ ls $myarray[@]
ls: cannot access one[@]: No such file or directory

But, as noted in the documentation, the brackets are for filename expansion, so let's try this:

$ touch one@
$ ls $myarray[@]
one@

Now we can see that the filename expansion happened after the $myarray exapansion.

And one more note, $myarray without a subscript expands to the first value of the array:

$ myarray[0]="one four"
$ echo $myarray[5]
one four[5]