[CentOS] [OT] Bash help

On Oct 25, 2017, at 11:00 AM, Leroy Tennison <leroy at datavoiceint.com> wrote:
> 
> Although "not my question", thanks, I learned a lot about array processing from your example.

Yeah, it’s amazing how many obscure corners of the Bash language must be tapped to solve such a simple problem.  I count 7 features in that script that I almost never use, because I’d have just written this one in Perl if not required to write it in Bash by the OP.

I expect that’s why the features are obscure to you, too: once you need to step beyond POSIX 1988 shell levels, most people just switch to some more powerful language, owing to the dark days when even a POSIX shell was sometimes tricky to find, much less a post-POSIX shell.  (Can you say /usr/xpg4/bin/sh ?   Yyyeahh…)

That situation threw a long shadow over the shell scripting landscape, where relatively few dare to tread, even today.