List Assignment

If you are familiar with Perl, C, or Java, you might think that Bash would use commas to separate array elements, however this is not the case; instead, Bash uses spaces:

# Array in Perl
my @array = (1, 2, 3, 4);

# Array in Bash
array=(1 2 3 4)

Create an array with new elements:

array=('first element' 'second element' 'third element')

Subscript Assignment

Create an array with explicit element indices:

array=([3]='fourth element' [4]='fifth element')

Assignment by index

array[0]='first element'
array[1]='second element'

Assignment by name (associative array)

declare -A array
array[first]='First element'
array[second]='Second element'

Dynamic Assignment

Create an array from the output of other command, for example use seq to get a range from 1 to 10:

array=(`seq 1 10`)

Assignment from script’s input arguments:

array=("$@")

Assignment within loops:

while read -r; do
    #array+=("$REPLY")     # Array append
    array[$i]="$REPLY"     # Assignment by index
    let i++                # Increment index 
done < <(seq 1 10)  # command substitution
echo ${array[@]}    # output: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10