Escaping strings in associative arrays (bash)

Question

I am writing a script which executes a number of programs with arguments. To simplify it as much as possible, consider the following example:

programs=( "ls" "echo" )
declare -A parameters
parameters["ls"]="-l /tmp/foo"
parameters["echo"]="Hello"

for program in "${programs[@]}"
do
  $program ${parameters[$program]}
done

This works fine as long as there are no spaces in the arguments. Of course, escaping strings has been discussed before, so I tried all of the different ways I could find here on StackExchange and some other pages. However, I could not find a solution which works in my case which uses associative arrays. For example, when I want to get a listing of "/tmp/foo bar", neither this

parameters["ls"]="-l /tmp/foo bar"

nor this

parameters["ls"]="-l \"/tmp/foo bar\""

nor this

parameters["ls"]="-l /tmp/foo\ bar"

works as expected. Similarly, putting quotes around the program call in the loop

  $program "${parameters[$program]}"

does not work either, since the two parameters (-l and the path) are interpreted as one parameter.

I found the closest thing to a solution in this post which proposes using multiple separate variables, one for each argument, for the program call. This, however, is not possible in my use case which requires a variable number of arguments for each program - thus my use of the associative array.

Is there any other way to escape the path name?

Best regards Andreas

Answer 1

First, create an array with the parameters.

Then, store the array string value (found with declare -p) at parameters, and recover and use it as an actual array later on like in:

#!/bin/bash

programs=( "ls" "echo" )
declare -A parameters

arrayTmp=("-l" "/tmp/foo bar")
parameters["ls"]="`declare -p arrayTmp |sed -r "s,[^=]*='(.*)'$,\1,"`"

parameters["echo"]="Hello"

for program in "${programs[@]}";do
    echo "PROGRAM: $program"
    declare -a arrayTmp="${parameters[$program]}"
    $program "${arrayTmp[@]}"
    arrayTmp=()
done