Arrays

Part of the Bash course

So far, one variable has held one value. name="Ada" holds one string. If you wanted to hold three names, you would either need three separate variables, name1, name2, name3, or you would stuff them into one string separated by spaces and hope none of them ever contains a space of its own. Neither is a good plan once a list has more than a couple of items.

Picture an egg carton. Each cup in the carton holds one egg, and each cup has a fixed position: the first cup, the second cup, and so on. You do not need a separate variable for "egg in cup one" and "egg in cup two", you just have one carton and you refer to a slot by its position. An indexed array in Bash is exactly this: one variable, many slots, each slot numbered starting from 0. ...