I found similar answers for bash, but not for sh so I'm asking.
I have a $STRING which contains something like "Jun01 Jun02 Jun03 Jun04". I would like to put this into an array such that ${ARRAY[0]} is "Jun01", ${ARRAY[1]} is "Jun02", etc.
How can I do this? Thank you.
You can't really handle arrays natively in the standard (Bourne) shell.
See here for more details.
The C shell ( 47.5 ) , awk ( 33.11 ) , the Korn shell, and some other UNIX command interpreters have built-in array support. The standard Bourne shell doesn't, though its command line is a sort-of array that you can store with the set ( 44.19 ) command - and get stored values through $1 , $2 , etc.
I would try and use bash (as you've identified) or a more fully featured scripting language such as Perl (no doubt others will suggest their favourites!)
sh does not have arrays, but the following hack is often adequate:
set $STRING
for x; do eval "ARRAY_$((i++))='$x'"; done
Now, (assuming i was unset or 0 to begin with), $ARRAY_0 has the value Jun01, $ARRAY_1 is Jun02, etc.
You can get away with the positional parameters: they're array-like.
set -- $STRING # no quotes here
echo $1
echo $2
# etc
