On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 4:08 AM Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> wrote: > But apparently someone stumbled upon this trick, and passed it around, > and now there's a whole subculture of people who use this as a hack for > trying to pass array variables to functions by reference. (This hack > predates declare -n.)
It's not a hack since indirection allows references to: 1) Digit-based parameters ($1, $2, etc.) 2) Special variables (which includes $@) 3) Valid array references (array[@] and array[1 + 1] are one of them) 4) Legal identifiers It's a definite shell feature despite lacking internal sanity checks. -- konsolebox
