Associative array in bash and for loop

Question

I am giving my first steps in bash and would like to create a associative array and iterate it. My instinct would be to do this:

declare -A FILES=(['SOURCE']='Source/Core/Core.js' ['DIST']='dist/Core.js')

for file in "${!FILES[@]}"; do
    echo $file - $FILES[$file]
done

But output is:

SOURCE - [SOURCE]
DIST - [DIST]

and no path as expected. What am I missing? and btw, is the declare -A required?

Demo: https://ideone.com/iQpjmj

Thank you

konsolebox · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-14 09:20:58Z

4

Place your expansions around braces. Without it, $FILES and $file would expand separately.

${FILES[$file]}

A good practice also is to place them around double quotes to prevent word splitting and possible pathname expansion:

echo "$file - ${FILES[$file]}"

Test:

$ declare -A FILES=(['SOURCE']='Source/Core/Core.js' ['DIST']='dist/Core.js')
$ for file in "${!FILES[@]}"; do echo "$file - ${FILES[$file]}"; done
SOURCE - Source/Core/Core.js
DIST - dist/Core.js

answered Aug 14, 2014 at 9:20

konsolebox

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1 Comment

Rikard Over a year ago

Thank you. One more step on my bash understanding.

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