Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm trying to extract the middle of an array that is of
variable length but always has a first and last common
element,

The following works OK...

Code:

#!/bin/bash
ARRAY[0]='switch'
ARRAY[1]='option1'
ARRAY[2]='option2'
ARRAY[3]='option3'
ARRAY[4]='value'

SWITCH=${ARRAY[@]:0:1}
VALUE=${ARRAY[@]:(-1)}
COUNT=${#ARRAY[@]}
OPTION=${ARRAY[@]:1:((COUNT-2))}

echo $SWITCH
echo $VALUE
echo $COUNT
echo "${OPTION[@]}"

However, I was wondering if their was a sub-string
extraction method that would extract the middle part
of the array, the options only, without having to resort
to counting the number of elements.

I can extract everything but zero element with
${ARRAY[@]:1} but I can't figure out how to extract
everything but Nth element.

Thanks in advance.

A.

As far as I understand the question, the answer is no (you could only avoid the temporary variable that stores the count):

Code:

${ARRAY[@]:1:${#ARRAY[@]}-2}

Actually, it seems that you need getopts.