Shell script read multiple inputs from user

Question

How to read any number of inputs from user at once and store it into an array. For example this will read only a single input at a time

  read -p "Please enter username: " username
  echo "Dear $username,"

I want something like:

read -p "Please enter location names separated by space: "

How would i store location names into an array and then loop through it.

UtLox · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-15 09:45:49Z

3

try this:

#!/bin/bash
read -r -p "Please enter location names separated by space: " -a arr
for location in "${arr[@]}"; do 
   echo "$location"
done

answered May 15, 2019 at 9:45

UtLox

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2 Comments

John Wick Over a year ago

script.sh: 2: read: Illegal option -a script.sh: 3: script.sh: Bad substitution

pjh Over a year ago

@JohnWick, the code is good(ish) Bash code. read in Bash has had the -a option for a very long time, so I suspect that you are running the code with another shell, possibly Dash. If you run the code with bash script.sh, or make the program executable and run it with ./script.sh, it should work unless you are using a decades-old version of Bash. You can't do what you want with Dash because it doesn't support arrays. See Does dash support bash style arrays?.

PilouPili · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-15 09:41:13Z

1

read -p "Please enter location names separated by space: " location_names

for location in $location_names
do
echo $location
done

Testing.

Please enter location names separated by space: paris london new-york
paris
london
new-york

answered May 15, 2019 at 9:41

PilouPili

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2 Comments

John Wick Over a year ago

Thanks, it worked. But how location_names becomed an array ?

PilouPili Over a year ago

for parses location_names with the space separator, technically location_names did not become an array

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