@Steve, to add an element you can just use “$myarr = (${myarr[@]} newelement) ..there is a space between myarr and newelement.

http://advogato.org/person/philiph/diary/0.html

another argument against using bash as a ‘real’ programming language I guess.

The rule I learned, just a little over a decade ago now, is “always double quote your variables, period.” I have to say that the rule has served me pretty well in general, and I have been bitten in at least a few cases over the years when I’ve forgotten the rule. I also remember running into a snag when I interpreted the rule to mean “double quote anything that will later be replaced by something else”: double quoting a command substitution can be harmful in certain circumstances. The rule is specific to variables.

Thanks for making the link in my brain between $* and myarr[*]. I hadn’t made that link for whatever reason. Bash is somewhat unique in that your use of it as a utility unto itself is kind of a prerequisite to using it as a scripting language. My understanding is also that it was never intended to be used for programming, so some of the inconsistencies I see in the shell are, I’m sure, a result of the incremental growth of the shell over the years to support constructs that support more advanced use as a scripting language. I’ll post more of these things in the future and maybe you can help me make sense of them.

otherscript “$@”

Or so I seem to remember from about twenty years ago. So it might seem like a wtf, but it’s not unreasonable to differentiate between the two cases.

myarr[${#myarr[*]}]=”$newitem”