Bash: whole array except the last element

Question

Bash has a neat way of providing all the elements in an array except the first:

"${a[@]:1}"

To get everything but the last one I found:

"${a[@]:0:$((${#a[@]}-1))}"

But, man, this is ugly.

Is there an elegant alternative?

+3

Ole tange 06 jul. 17 at 4:20 am

1 answer

heemayl · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-06T04:39:33+0000

I'm not sure how much better it would be, but you can drop the arithmetic operator ( $(())

) and the starting index ( 0

here):

${a[@]::${#a[@]}-1}

So:

$ foo=( 1 2 3 )

$ echo "${foo[@]::${#foo[@]}-1}"
1 2

As you can see, the improvement is purely syntactic; the idea remains the same.