Re: [Help-bash] How to print a bash variable in the most succinct way?

[Matthew Cengia]

On 2016-08-10 11:04, Marco Silva wrote:
> Excerpts from Greg Wooledge's message of 2016-08-10 08:40:24 -0400:
> > Stop complaining that autogenerated code is less elegant than
> > human-written code.  Write the code yourself if you don't like what a
> > computer wrote for you.
> 
> You are wrong. As well as impolite. He is not complaining about
> auto-generated code.
> 
> Actually, Mr. Yu has one good question about an idiom to construct
> an array out of a list of values. Unfortunately, shell scripts
> deals with many forms of lists, and arrays are really not a data
> structure in shell. They were introduced to late, and they are clumsy to
> retrieve values from.
> 
> You can compare:
> 
> set a b c; while [[ -n $1 ]]; do echo $1; shift; done
> 
> With
> 
> a=(a b c); i=0; while [[ $i -le 2 ]]; do echo ${a[$i]}; i=$(($i+1)); done
> 
> As you can see, arrays declaration is something cheap, just a list of
> values separated by a $IFS . But, to retrieve it you must use a clumsy
> syntax, which many authors avoid to use in favor of positional
> parameters.

Greg is, in fact, correct.

The OP is complaining about the output of 'declare -p', which produces
an auto-generated array declaration, and is asserting that the
auto-generated array declaration should look a particular way.

Additionally, your own assertion that printing arrays is difficult is
incorrect:

a=(a b c); printf "%s\n" "address@hidden"

I agree that Greg is very direct and calls things as they are, and that
may be seen as impoliteness, but I also don't blame them for doing so,
given the circumstances.

-- 
Regards,
Matthew Cengia

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