Re: Use of $@

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/23/23 7:29 AM, Christof Warlich wrote:

> ... but (to me, unexpectedly) the following does not work:
>
> $ a=(hi ho)
> $ f() for i in "${!@}"; do echo $i; done
> $ f "${a[@]}"
> bash: hi ho: invalid variable name
>
> Wouldn' it make sense to make "${!a[@}" and "${!@}" behave similar in
> some future version of bash?

It's not very useful. The value of ${!name[@]} is twofold: indexed arrays
can be sparse, and associative arrays have arbitrary keys. Neither of
those is true of the positional parameters. The indices always go from
1 (or 0) to $#, consecutively. Why do you need a different expansion to
get that?

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/