Such an expansion will not work, regardless of array content or files to process. The reason is that all the variables are expanded at the same time when the shell tries to digest an input line.

Consider the following example:

Code:

a="/some/where"
ls -l $a

What the shell does is: it first notices that "$a" is a variable and expands that. In the example "a" is given some content before but if this would be not the case "$a" would just expand to the empty string. Then it replaces the variable by its content:

Code:

ls -l /some/where

only then this resulting line is executed.

Now, if several variables are in a single commandline they are all expanded at the same time. This means, that any construct where one variables expansion is necessary to expand another variable will fail:

Code:

${TMPArray$y[$e]}

Here it would be necessary to first expand "$y" to determine the name of the array first and only then look up array element "$e" in this array.

Actually there is a way to achieve this: eval This command does nothing itself, it just tells the shell to start over the parsing process again. For instance:

Code:

a='$b'
b="hello world"

echo $a

will not bear the desired result of first expanding "$a" to "$b" and then expand "$b" to "hello world" for the reasons given above. But:

Code:

a='$b'
b="hello world"

eval echo $a

will do the trick.

Fortunately you do not need eval (which one should try to avoid the same way one avoids dynamite: it is a potent but dangerous device and deadly if not handled with utmost care). I do not know about bash (which you seem to prefer scripting in for reasons i do not entirely understand) but in Korn Shell (ksh), which is available for all systems i know there are multidimensional arrays:

Code:

x=( ( 11 12 13 ) ( 21 22 23 ) ( 31 32 33 ) )
for i in {0..2} ; do
     for j in {0..2} ; do
          echo ${x[$i][$j]}
     done
done
11
12
13
21
22
23
31
32
33

I hope this helps.

bakunin