Bash Array – For Loop

To iterate over items of an array in Bash, we can use For loop. There are two ways to iterate over items of array using For loop.

The first way is to use the syntax of For loop where the For loop iterates for each element in the array.

The second way is to use the For loop that iterates from index=0 to index=array length and access the array element using index in each iteration.

For Each Element in Array

In the following script, we take an array arr with three items, and iterate over the items of this array using For loop with for-each syntax.

Example.sh

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arr=( "apple" "banana" "cherry" )

for item in "${arr[@]}"
do
    echo $item
done

Output

apple
banana
cherry

Iterate over Array Items using For Loop and Index

We take index and increment it in for loop until array length. During each iteration of the loop, we use the index to access the item in array.

Example.sh

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arr=( "apple" "banana" "cherry" )

for (( i=0; i<${#arr[@]}; i++ ));
do
    echo ${arr[$i]}
done

Output

apple
banana
cherry

Conclusion

In this Bash Tutorial, we have learnt how to iterate over items of an array using For loop.