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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I am trying to do the following in my script:

#/bin/bash -x
var1=www
var2=www2
var3=www3
var4=www4
for i in 1 2 3 4; do
   echo \$var$i
done

Obviously, this doesn't work as expected and results in the following output:

$var1
$var2
$var3
$var4

How can I dynamically reference the variables in my loop?

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4 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Are you looking for this?

$ cat indirection.sh
#!/bin/bash -x

var1=www
var2=www2
var3=www3
var4=www4
for i in 1 2 3 4; do
        s="var${i}"
        echo "${!s}"
done

 

$ ./indirection.sh
www
www2
www3
www4
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How does your script work without ! in shebang!? –  sasha.sochka Aug 1 at 20:43
 
@sasha.sochka Copy-paste mistake from the OP's code...fixed, thanks. –  Adrian Frühwirth Aug 2 at 7:19
up vote 6 down vote

You could use an array:

#/bin/bash -x

declare -a vars=(
    www
    www2
    www3
    www4
)

for var in "${vars[@]}"; do
   echo $var
done

Or iterate with index:

for i in echo ${!vars[@]}; do
    echo ${vars[$i]}
done
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4  
NOte, you always want to quote "${vars[@]}", otherwise the for loop will break on any whitespace in the array element values. e.g. var=("elem 1" "elem 2"). Only omit the double quotes if you want this (usually unexpected) behaviour. –  glenn jackman Jul 31 at 10:59
 
You are right, I forgot it. –  ahilsend Jul 31 at 12:53
up vote 2 down vote

Use an associative array. There's no good reason to generate variable names like this.

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up vote 1 down vote

Normally shell expands variable only once. You can use indirect expand or ask shell to expand it one more time, for example:

eval val=\$var$i; echo $val;

instead of just:

echo \$var$i

This method is very portable, but uses evil eval.

Using indirect expansion as shown in other answers (see Parameter Expansion in man bash) ${!VAR_NAME} is a good solution, when portability is not necessary and you are allowed to use BASH extensions.

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