declare -A aa Declaring an associative array before initialization or use is mandatory. You can initialize elements one at a time as follows: aa[hello]=world aa[ab]=cd aa["key with space"]="hello world" You can also initialize an entire associative array … The sed based solutions will transform it in -option1 -option2 -with -space - option3 (length 5), but the above bash expansion will transform it into -option1 Bash arrays have numbered indexes only, but they are sparse, ie you don't have to define all the indexes. Initialize elements. Access elements of Bash Array. There are different ways to print the whole elements of the array. As of bash 4.2, you can just use a negative index ${myarray[-1]} to get the last element. Bash Associative Array (dictionaries, hash table, or key/value pair) You cannot create an associative array on the fly in Bash. I tried to set the space character using the \ symbol, but this doesn't help. Note that there has to be no space around the assignment operator =. Now you can access the array to get any word you desire or use the for loop in bash to print all the words one by one as I have done in the above script. echo is easy to use and mostly it fits our needs without any problem. Declare an associative array. echo ${ARRAY_NAME [2]} Print Bash Array with all the information. You can access elements of a Bash Array using the index. 3.4 Filling the Extra Space When printing a small number like 27in a %5dfield, the question then became where to put the 27and what to put in the other three slots. However, with simplicity very often comes limitation. You can only use the declare built-in command with the uppercase “-A” option.The += operator allows you to append one or multiple key/value to an associative Bash array. You can traverse through the array elements and print it, using looping statements in bash. What you're doing is tricky. This is also the case with echo command. This is because I intend to introduce bash loop concepts later in this series. It could be printed in the first two spaces, the last two spaces, or maybe the middle two spaces (if that can be deter-mined). In the code below, the third array element is "Accessory Engine". the size of the array: echo ${#files[@]} 5 I'm working with array elements that contain space characters. The empty spaces could be filled with the Here’s the output of the above script: Ubuntu Linux Mint Debian Arch Fedora Method 2: Split string using tr command in Bash. The normal way is to avoid this and just pass the array values as arguments. You can print the total number of the files array elements, i.e. You can also print out all the array elements at once: echo ${files[*]} f1.txt f2.txt f3.txt f4.txt f5.txt. If the index number is @ or *, all members of an array are referenced. This is the bash split string example using tr (translate) command: Print the Whole Bash Array. 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