bcardoza@npd.Novell.COM (Bryan Cardoza) (11/29/90)
In article <1990Nov27.002845.3387@informix.com> housed@infmx.informix.com (Darryl House) writes: >The following is a Bourne shell script that illustrates >what I am trying to do: set a shell variable that >contains the contents of another one that is referred >to by concatenating two others. Sufficiently confusing? Pointer variables in Bourne shell? You mean like this? #! /bin/sh PREFIXES="alpha gamma" SUFFIXES="beta delta" alphabeta=1 alphadelta=2 gammabeta=3 gammadelta=4 for prefix in ${PREFIXES} do for suffix in ${SUFFIXES} do # Notice that the combination of "eval" and escaping # the first "$" does the magic you want. eval magic=\${${prefix}${suffix}} echo ${magic} done done Is this what you mean? (I've found this really usefull in calling shell procedures with different global shell variable names as arguments.) -- Bryan Cardoza <Bryan_Cardoza@NPD.Novell.COM> Software Engineer Novell, Inc. Telephone: (801) 429-3149 Provo, UT Fax: (801) 429-3500