In a loop over an array, add an element to the array

Question

I have a problem with for loop in bash. For example: I have an array ("etc" "bin" "var"). And I iterate on this array. But in the loop I would like append some value to the array. E.g.

array=("etc" "bin" "var") for i in "${array[@]}" do echo $i done 

This displays etcbinvar (of course on separate lines). And if I append after do like that:

array=("etc" "bin" "var") for i in "${array[@]}" do array+=("sbin") echo $i done 

I want: etcbinvarsbin (of course on separate lines).

This is not working. How can I do it?

Answer 1

It will append "sbin" 3 times as it should, but it won't iterate over the newly added "sbin"s in the same loop.

After the 2nd example:

echo "${array[@]}" #=> etc bin var sbin sbin sbin 

Answer 2

set etc bin var while [ "$#" -gt 1 ] do [ "$1" = bin ] && set "$@" sbin printf %s\\n "$1" shift;done 

That will iterate over your list, tack sbin onto the end of said list conditionally, and include sbin in the iterable content.