Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everybody,
I've written the following script:

vOutputFile="subs_out.txt"
vAccount1="ebsemerg"
vAccount2="ebsemer2"
vAccount3="ebsemer3"
vAccount4="ebsemer4"
vAccount5="ebsemer5"
vAccount="vAccount"
vNumber=1234567
cd /opt/east/bin

echo ${print 'vAccount'${ind}}

for (( ind = 1; ind <= 5; ind++ ))
do
echo eracc status `echo vAccount${ind}` $vNumber
done

I'm trying to execute a for loop and access the value for variable vAccount1 to vAccount5. For that I'm construncting the variable name with `echo vAccount${ind}` command but not able to ask for the value of new created string which is a variable name.

The script produces the below output:
eracc status vAccount1 1234567
eracc status vAccount2 1234567
eracc status vAccount3 1234567
eracc status vAccount4 1234567
eracc status vAccount5 1234567

but I want the output to be:
eracc status value_of_vAccount1 1234567
eracc status value_of_vAccount2 1234567
eracc status value_of_vAccount3 1234567
eracc status value_of_vAccount4 1234567
eracc status value_of_vAccount5 1234567

Can anybody help me out

thanks & regards,
Jitu

I was stuck once myself when scripting this way.

One mistake I can point out in your script is that you have written

Code:

vAccount${ind}

This would obviously replace only the ind variable.

If you try and do something like

Code:

echo $vAccount${ind}

you would get something like

Code:

bash: $vAccount${ind}: bad substitution

Guys, if anyone knows what exactly is the problem here, please let us know.

Meanwhile what you could do is use arrays (this is what I did)
Eg: vAccount[1], vAccount[2], etc.
To use them, you would need to access the variable by $vAccount[$ind]

Yeap. I tried many ways ... but those didn't work ...
I too have the same idea of using arrays

Hope will get the solution for the first way

You can use arrays.

With ksh93, zsh ans bash:

Code:

vAccounts=(ebsemerg ebsemerg2 ebsemerg3) vNumber=1234567
for ((i=0;i<${#vAccounts[@]};i++)); do 
  printf 'the value of %s is %d\n' "${vAccounts[i]}" $vNumber
done

NB: In Z shell the arrays are 1 based.

Or just foreach:

Code:

vAccounts=(ebsemerg ebsemerg2 ebsemerg3) vNumber=1234567
for e in "${vAccounts[@]}"; do 
  printf 'the value of %s is %d\n' "$e" $vNumber
done

With pre-POSIX shells that don't support arrays natively
you can emulate such structures with positional parameters:

Code:

set -- ebsemerg ebsemerg2 ebsemerg3 
vNumber=1234567
for e in "$@"; do 
  printf 'the value of %s is %d\n' "$e" $vNumber
done

If you want array indexed by strings (not integers), i.e. associative arrays, you'll need a more sophisticated shell like ksh93, zsh or bash4.

With ksh93 you can use the following syntax:

Code:

a=([vAccount1]=ebsemerg [vAccount2]=ebsemer2 [vAccount3]=ebsemer3)
vNumber=1234567

for k in "${!a[@]}"; do
  printf 'the variable %s contains the key %s which has the value %d\n' "$k" "${a[$k]}" $vNumber
done