Set new variable with name of string from existing variable

Question

I am trying to do something like below:

for a in apple orange grape; do
    ${!a}="blah"
done
echo $apple
blah

Possible?

Answer 1

Use declare.

for a in apple orange grape; do
    declare "$a=blah"
done

Answer 2

I wonder if you might want to use associative arrays instead:

declare -A myarray
for a in apple orange grape; do
    myarray[$a]="blah"
done
echo ${myarray[apple]}

Note associative arrays require bash version 4.0 or greater.