How to iterate through an array and output certain words in a bash script?

Question

I am writing a basic bash script to iterate through an array and I have to output the words starting with the letters 't' and 'm'. I used grep to obtain the words starting with certain letters, but I am unable to output more than one letter. How do I use grep to search for more than one starting letter? Or is there a better way to approach this?

 #!/bin/bash
Unix=( "car" "hello" "tony" "mustard" );
echo ${Unix[@]}

echo "Here are the words starting with t + m: "
for i in ${Unix[@]}
do
    echo $i | grep '^\t'
done

see unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25821/…

Vincent Rodomista
– Vincent Rodomista

2020-04-01 18:52:57 +00:00
Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 18:52 — Vincent Rodomista
– Vincent Rodomista, Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 18:52

Cyrus · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-01 17:41:23Z

1

I suggest:

grep -e '^t' -e'^m'

or

grep -E '^(m|t)'

See: man grep

answered Apr 1, 2020 at 17:41

Cyrus

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2 Comments

Quasímodo Over a year ago

@MiSully Consider accepting the answer by clicking the green mark next to it if it solves your problem

Cyrus Over a year ago

I suggest to replace echo $i | grep ... with if [[ "$i" =~ ^(m|t) ]]; then echo "$i"; fi. This does not require an external program (grep) and no pipe (two new processes).

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