How to pass an array argument to the Bash script

Question

It is surprising me that I do not find the answer after 1 hour search for this. I would like to pass an array to my script like this:

test.sh argument1 array argument2 

I DO NOT want to put this in another bash script like following:

array=(a b c) for i in "${array[@]}" do   test.sh argument1 $i argument2 done 

Answer 1

Bash arrays are not "first class values" -- you can't pass them around like one "thing".

Assuming test.sh is a bash script, I would do

#!/bin/bash arg1=$1; shift array=( "$@" ) last_idx=$(( ${#array[@]} - 1 )) arg2=${array[$last_idx]} unset array[$last_idx]  echo "arg1=$arg1" echo "arg2=$arg2" echo "array contains:" printf "%s\n" "${array[@]}" 

And invoke it like

test.sh argument1 "${array[@]}" argument2