The following is (almost) a copy of this answer with a few tweaks that make it fit this question.
The Original Question
First let’s assign a few variables to play with, 26 tokens in each of them:
var1="$(echo {a..z})"
var2="$(echo {1..26})"
var3="$(echo I II III IV \
V{,I,II,III} IX \
X{,I,II,III} XIV \
XV{,I,II,III} XIX \
XX{,I,II,III} XXIV \
XXV XXVI)"
var4="$(echo {A..Z})"
var5="$(echo {010101..262626..10101})"
Now we want a “magic” function that zips an arbitrary number of variables, ideally in pure Bash:
zip_vars var1 # a trivial test
zip_vars var{1..2} # a slightly less trivial test
zip_vars var{1..3} # the original question
zip_vars var{1..4} # more vars, becasuse we can
zip_vars var{1..5} # more vars, because why not
What could zip_vars look like? Here’s one in pure Bash, without any external commands:
zip_vars() {
local var
for var in "$@"; do
local -a "array_${var}"
local -n array_ref="array_${var}"
array_ref=(${!var})
local -ar "array_${var}"
done
local -n array_ref="array_${1}"
local -ir size="${#array_ref[@]}"
local -i i
local output
for ((i = 0; i < size; ++i)); do
output=
for var in "$@"; do
local -n array_ref="array_${var}"
output+=",${array_ref[i]}"
done
printf '%s\n' "${output:1}"
done
}
How it works:
- It splits all variables (passed by reference (by variable name)) into arrays. For each variable
varX it creates a local array array_varX.
- It would be actually way easier if the input variables were already Bash arrays to start with (see below), but … we stick with the original question initially.
- It determines the
size of the first array and then blindly expects all arrays to be of that size.
- For each index
i from 0 to size - 1 it concatenates the ith elements of all arrays, separated by ,.
Arrays Make Things Easier
If you use Bash arrays from the very start, the script will be shorter and look simpler and there won’t be any string-to-array conversions.
zip_arrays() {
local -n array_ref="$1"
local -ir size="${#array_ref[@]}"
local -i i
local output
for ((i = 0; i < size; ++i)); do
output=
for arr in "$@"; do
local -n array_ref="$arr"
output+=",${array_ref[i]}"
done
printf '%s\n' "${output:1}"
done
}
arr1=({a..z})
arr2=({1..26})
arr3=( I II III IV
V{,I,II,III} IX
X{,I,II,III} XIV
XV{,I,II,III} XIX
XX{,I,II,III} XXIV
XXV
XXVI)
arr4=({A..Z})
arr5=({010101..262626..10101})
zip_arrays arr1 # a trivial test
zip_arrays arr{1..2} # a slightly less trivial test
zip_arrays arr{1..3} # (almost) the original question
zip_arrays arr{1..4} # more arrays, becasuse we can
zip_arrays arr{1..5} # more arrays, because why not
var1=( a b c d e...z )) and use a loop over the indexes. Have a look at this other question maybe.pastesolves this nicely, but I think the “nameref” solution in Bash also has its qualities — in particular, it is much easier to scale to an arbitrary number of variables (and requires just one command-line token per variable). I’ve added an answer showing what I mean.