Elements of a bash array as separate command line arguments to python

Question

I have a bash array which have paths in the form of string as its elements.

${arr[0]} = "path/to/json1"
${arr[1]} = "path/to/json2"
${arr[2]} = "path/to/json3"

and so on...

Now I want to pass all these elements as command line arguments to a python command within the same bash script at the same time

python3 script.py ${arr[0]} ${arr[1]} ${arr[2]}

But the problem is the number of elements in arr varies and is not fixed. So I can't hard code each element as a separate argument like above.

How can we pass all the elements of a bash array as command line arguments to python command?

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-18 02:14:59Z

4

Use ${arr[@]} to refer to the entire array.

python3 script.py "${arr[@]}"

This isn't specific to Python, it's how you pass all the array elements to any command.

You should also always quote shell variables unless you have a good reason not to.

answered Mar 18, 2019 at 2:14

Barmar

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3 Comments

Phanindra Over a year ago

Doesn't that concatenate all the paths in the array and pass it as a single string (like python3 scripy.py "path/to/json1 path/to/json2 path/to/json3")? I want to pass all the path elements separately (like python3 scripy.py "path/to/json1" "path/to/json2" "path/to/json3").

Barmar Over a year ago

No, that would happen with "${arr[*]}", but [@] is treated differently.

Barmar Over a year ago

@PhanindraRajaChava See stackoverflow.com/questions/3348443/…

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