alternative to readarray, because it does not work on mac os x

You could use a read loop.

while IFS=\= read var value; do vars+=($var) values+=($value) done < VarsValues.txt 

Mac uses an outdated version of bash (due to licencing reasons) by default which is lacking the readarray command.

This solution worked best for me (Mac user):

Check version of bash (probably version 3 from 2007)

bash --version 

Download latest version of bash

brew install bash 

Open a new terminal (which will load the new environment), then check the new version of bash (should be version 5 or higher)

bash --version 

Check location(s) of bash

which -a bash 

Output:

/usr/local/bin/bash /bin/bash 

You can see that you now have two versions of bash. Usually, both of these paths are in your PATH variable.

Check PATH variable

echo $PATH 

The /usr/local/bin/bash should be standing before the /bin/bash in this variable. The shell is searching for executables in the order of occurrence in the PATH variable and takes the first one it finds.

Make sure to use a bash shell (rather than zsh) when using this command.

Try out the readarray command by e.g. redirecting the output of the ls command with command substitution to the readarray command to generate an array containing a list with the filenames of the current folder:

readarray var < <(ls); echo ${var[@]} 

Also, if you want to write a bash script make sure to use the correct Shebang:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash 

You can use extra brackets:

vars=( $(cut -d '=' -f1 varsValues.txt) ) values=( $(cut -d '=' -f2 varsValues.txt) ) 

You can prefix with declare -a but as commenters have pointed out it's superfluous.

declare -a vars=( $(cut -d '=' -f1 varsValues.txt) ) declare -a values=( $(cut -d '=' -f2 varsValues.txt) ) 

Try:

IFS=$'\n' vars=($(cut -d '=' -f1 varsValues.txt)) IFS=$'\n' values=($(cut -d '=' -f2 varsValues.txt)) 

perl -0777 -nE '@F= split /[=\r\n]/; say "@F[grep !($_%2), 0..$#F]"; say "@F[grep $_%2, 0..$#F]"' varsValues.txt 

or by reading same file twice,

perl -F'=' -lane 'print $F[0]' varsValues.txt perl -F'=' -lane 'print $F[1]' varsValues.txt 

Let's start with this:

$ awk -F'=' '{values[$1]=$2} END{print values["people"]}' file 7.2 $ awk -F'=' '{values[$1]=$2} END{for (name in values) print name, values[name]}' file languages 2014 oceans 3.4 world 1 something 20.6 countries 205 people 7.2 aa 13.7 

Now - what else do you need to do?

Figured I'd toss this in here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdrianTP/new-environment-setup/master/utils/readarray.sh

#!/bin/bash # from: https://peniwize.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/how-to-read-all-lines-of-a-file-into-a-bash-array/ readarray() { local __resultvar=$1 declare -a __local_array let i=0 while IFS=$'\n' read -r line_data; do __local_array[i]=${line_data} ((++i)) done < $2 if [[ "$__resultvar" ]]; then eval $__resultvar="'${__local_array[@]}'" else echo "${__local_array[@]}" fi } 

I keep this in a "utils" folder in my "new-environment-setup" Github repo, and I just clone it down and import it whenever I need to read a file into an array of lines an array get a new computer or wipe my drive. It should thus act as a backfill for readarray's shortcomings on Mac.

Import looks like:

# From: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12694189/771948 DIR="${BASH_SOURCE%/*}" if [[ ! -d "$DIR" ]]; then DIR="$PWD"; fi . "$DIR/utils/readarray.sh" 

Usage looks like readarray "<output_var_name>" "<input_file_name>".

Yes it's a little rough. Sorry about that. It may not even work correctly anymore, but it did at one point, so I thought I would share it here to plant the idea of simply...writing your own backfill.

You can define a readarray function if it doesn't exist.

# Define a fallback readarray function if it doesn't exist if ! command -v readarray >/dev/null 2>&1; then readarray() { local line local array_name="$1"; shift # Reset the array to empty eval "$array_name=()" # Read input line-by-line and append to the array while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do eval "$array_name+=(\"\$line\")" done } fi 

readarray also takes flags, so you might decide to extend this implementation to support whichever ones you need.