---
title: Bash
subtitle: best practices
---
(Associative) arrays
--------------------

### Declaration

`"${#xs[@]}"` doesn't work with `nounset` if `xs` wasn't defined, i.e. was
declared with either of

    local -a xs
    declare -a xs
    local -A xs
    declare -A xs

Therefore, if you want to extract the length of an array, append `=()` to the
statements above.

    local -a xs=()
    declare -a xs=()
    ...

And now `"${#xs[@]}"` works with `nounset`.
It doesn't affect expansion (see below) though.

### Expansion

#### Do

    func ${arr[@]+"${arr[@]}"}

#### Don't

    func "${arr[@]}"                # Doesn't work with `nounset`.
    func "${arr[@]+"${arr[@]}"}"    # Doesn't work properly with `declare -a arr=('')`.

### `unset`

#### Do

    unset -v 'arr[x]'
    unset -v 'arr[$i]'

#### Don't

    unset -v arr[x]         # May break due to globbing.
    unset -v arr[$i]        # The same as above + a possible problem with quotation.
    unset -v 'arr["x"]'     # Doesn't work for some reason.
    unset -v 'arr["]"]'     # The same as above; just highlighting the problem with funny characters in array indices.
    unset -v 'arr["$i"]'    # Also rejected.

    # An insightful discussion on the topic: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bash/2016-09/msg00020.html.

`errexit`
---------

### Do

    bar_output="$( bar )"
    foo "$bar_output"

### Don't

    foo "$( bar )"    # With `errexit`, foo will still get executed.
                      # I don't know why.