I am trying to change the values inside an array that is a copy of arguments array ("$@"). Let's say I execute the script as follows: $ sh script.sh 1 2 3
This is the script:
list="$@"
echo ${list[*]}
list[1]=4
echo ${list[*]}
Expected output:
1 2 3
1 4 3
What I actually get:
1 2 3
1 2 3 4
Any idea what causes this behavior and how can I fix it?
list="$@" sets list to a plain variable, not an array. Use list=("$@") to store it as an array instead. BTW, you should generally use "${list[@]}" to get the elements of an array, instead of ${list[*]} to avoid problems with whitespace in elements, wildcards getting expanded to lists of matching files, etc.
In general, this is the proper way to copy an array:
copyarray=("${oldarray[@]}")
Just found this answer. Command line arguments array is not quite a normal array and has to be converted to an actual array first as follows:
list=("$@")
parens.