Check that 2 arrays of file names are the same

Question

So I have the following:

cat file | grep -E regex  

which gives a list of lines
Now I also have a for loop the produces a list of files
So it is like I have 2 arrays.
But how do I check in bash if both arrays have the same content? My bash version does not support associative arrays (4.2).
Should I find another way other than bash or is it doable with bash easily too?

Update
I go over for i in foo/bar/* and record the paths so I essentially I have somewhere:

foo/bar/a/b  
foo/bar/c/d   
foo/bar/e etc  

So I essentially just want to re-run the for loop and check that I get exactly the same outcome.

Answer 1

Assuming your arrays are named "array1" and "array2", bash code to check for equality:

equal=true
if [[ ${#array1[@]} -ne ${#array2[@]} ]]; then
    equal=false
else
    while IFS= read -r elem1 <&3; IFS= read -r elem2 <&4; do
        if [[ "$elem1" != "$elem2" ]]; then
            equal=false
            break
        fi
    done 3< <(printf "%s\n" "${array1[@]}" | sort) \
         4< <(printf "%s\n" "${array2[@]}" | sort)
fi
if $equal; then
    echo arrays have the same contents
else
    echo arrays have different contents
fi

This will be (probably "much") slower than calling out to external tools.

diff <(grep -E regex file1) <(grep -E regex file2)