Shell Programming and Scripting

I am using an array (clmlist01). I have 61 of these and have 4 or more references to each one in a block of code that I do not want to have to hardcode. With that being said, I am creating a varible and going through a for loop to create the actually name of each array. The arrays would end up being cmlist01, cmlist02, cmlist03, etc. I don't have any problem creating the variables, but I seem to be doing something wrong in the syntax because if I use ${#cmlist01[@]} it gives me 11, but if I try to resolve the variable substituion name (listnbr), it resoves to cmlist01, but the ${#listnbr[@]} always returns 1. Is it possible to do what I am trying, or do you have to always hardcode the actual array name (instead of resoving it on the fly)? Help with the syntax please!

Are you looking for something like this?

Code:

q1=( q w e r t y u i o p )
q2=( a s d f g h j k l )
q3=( z x c v b n m )

for var in q1 q2 q3
do
  eval "printf '%d\n' \"\${#${var}[@]}\""
done

No, I'm trying to do this:

cmlist01 has a b c d e
cmlist02 has f g h i
cmlist03 has j k l

For the total in cmlist01, I should see 5 items.
For the total in cmlist02, I should see 4 items.
For the total in cmlist03, I should see 3 items.

As a result, I could do:

print "There are ${#cmlist01[@]} items in $listnbr:"
which prints "There are 5 itmes in cmlist01."

However, I want to do all of this in a for loop and have it derive the cmlistnn from the variable $listnbr (which is does just fine as evidenced in the output from the print statement). However, if I try to get the count (number of items in the array) using listnbr (instead of hardcoding cmlistnn in each statement), all I ever get is 1.

If I set the variable listnbr=cmlist01, I should see 5 items, but am only seeing 1 when I do:

print "There are ${#listnbr[@]} items in $listnbr:"
which prints "There are 1 itmes in cmlist01."

The main part of the code that I need this for is:

Code:

while [ $i -lt ${#cmlist03[@]} ]
     do
          ID=${cmlist03[$i]}
          echo "Processing $i with ${cmlist03[$i]}"

Maybe you just can't do what I'm trying to do...

Code:

cmlist01=( a b c d e)
cmlist02=( f g h i )
cmlist03=( j k l )

for listnbr in cmlist01 cmlist02 cmlist03
do
  eval "printf 'There are %d items in %s:\n' \"\${#${listnbr}[@]}\" \"$listnbr\""
  eval "printf '\t%s\n' \"\${$listnbr[@]}\""

done