Re: [Help-bash] indirection for arrays

[Greg Wooledge]

On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 02:16:36PM -0600, Bill Gradwohl wrote:
> Via a web site reference, Dan Douglas (Thank You) provided something akin
> to this:
> 
> func() {
>     local -a 'keys=("${!'"$1"'address@hidden")'

It burns!!

> declare -a myArray=(1 2 3)
> 
> func 'myArray'

For the love of god, if you want to pass arrays to a function by name,
use ksh93, not bash.

arc3:~$ cat foo
#!/bin/ksh
foo() {
  nameref array="$1"
  array[42]=forty-two
}
foo bar
for i in "address@hidden"; do
  echo "bar[$i]=${bar[i]}"
done
arc3:~$ ./foo
bar[42]=forty-two

UNTIL SUCH TIME as bash has a feature like this, you cannot do this in
bash.  Throwing dozens of random punctuation characters at the screen
until the code appears to do what you think it should do is not sane.