Assigning a shell variable name where the variable name comes from a for loop

Asked Jun 29 '16 at 00:35

Active Jun 29 '16 at 00:35

Viewed 39 times

I am able run a script that contains

for fname in deletions
do
        numdeletions=$(ls -l ${2}/deletions{[1-9],[1-9][0-9]}.txt | wc -l)
done

And it works just fine

However when script contains

for fname in deletions
do
        num${fname}=$(ls -l ${2}/deletions{[1-9],[1-9][0-9]}.txt | wc -l)
done

I get

./testScript.sh: line 4: numdeletions=: command not found

How am I able to fix this

asked Jun 29 '16 at 00:35

Sam

3

It is *very* bad practice to use dynamic variable names in almost all programming languages. Are you sure you need this? (The answer is usually "no".) – Andras Deak -- Слава Україні Jun 29 '16 at 00:36
1

Possible duplicate of [Bash dynamic variable names](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16553089/bash-dynamic-variable-names) – Andras Deak -- Слава Україні Jun 29 '16 at 00:37
Please take a look at the linked duplicate, you'll see what you *should* do instead of this:) – Andras Deak -- Слава Україні Jun 29 '16 at 00:37
@AndrasDeak yeah I'm sure I wanna do this – Sam Jun 29 '16 at 00:42
2

Application like this are what bash's _associative arrays_ were made for. Is there a reason why you don't want to use them here? – John1024 Jun 29 '16 at 01:19

0 Answers0