How to generate new var names on the fly

Question

I'm trying to generate dynamic var names in a shell script to process a set of files with distinct names in a loop as follows:

SAMPLE1='1-first.with.custom.name'
SAMPLE2='2-second.with.custom.name'

for (( i = 1; i <= 2; i++ ))
do
  echo SAMPLE{$i}
done

I would expect the output:

1-first.with.custom.name
2-second.with.custom.name

but i got:

SAMPLE{1}
SAMPLE{2}

Is it possible generate var names in the fly?

Answer 1

Why not use an array, they're meant for doing things like that.

sample[1]='1-first.with.custom.name'
sample[2]='2-second.with.custom.name'

for (( i = 1; i <= 2; i++ ))
do
  echo ${sample[$i]}
done

Also don't use all-capital variable names in your script to prevent accidentally using reserved variable names.

Answer 2

I found that I can get the expected results as follows:

for (( i = 1; i <= 2; i++ ))
do
  NEW_NAME=SAMPLE$i
  echo ${!NEW_NAME}
done

Answer 3

If you want to do it using portable, POSIX standard shell and avoid bash extensions like arrays, you need to use eval:

$ foo1='a b c'
$ foo2='d e f'
$ a=1; eval echo \$foo$a
a b c
$ a=2; eval echo \$foo$a
d e f