How to pass and get array as an argument to shell

Question

I am passing multiple argument to a shell script. I that script I want to create an array from 2nd argument till the last argument. This I am able to do with below -

arg=$1
shift
while [[ $1 != '' ]]
do
        emailID[${#emailID[@]}]=$1
shift
done

This emailID array I want to pass to second script as second argument and I want to retrieve the array in this second script. Is there a way to do it in ksh/bash?

Answer 1

Just use ${@:2}. It is explained here perfectly.

And to pass it into another script:

./anotherScript "${@:2}"

Of course it will not pass it as array (because you cannot pass an array), but it will pass all elements of that array as individual parameters.

---

Okay, lets try it this way. Here is your first script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Here is my awesome first argument: $1"
var=$1 # I can assign it into a variable if I want to!
echo 'Okay, and here are my other parameters!'
for curArg in "${@:2}"; do
    echo "Some arg: $curArg"
done
myArr=("${@:2}") # I can assign it into a variable as well!

echo 'Now lets pass them into another script!'
./anotherScript 'Wheeee' "${@:2}"

And here is your another script:

#!/bin/bash
echo 'Alright! Here we can retrieve some arguments!'
echo "Here we go: $@" # that is including 'Wheeee' from the previous script. But we can use the same trick from above if we want to.

Answer 2

You can use:

arg="$1"
shift
emailID=( "$@" )

The second assignment makes an array out of the remaining arguments. You might get away without the quotes around $1 these days; it was not always thus and I use double quotes for consistency.

You can then pass the array to the second script:

second_script "${emailID[@]}"

However, it is up to the second script to decide whether to treat the arguments as an array. There is no difference between that and passing a number of separate arguments. You can't distinguish the array from arguments before or after the array.