What does this do in bash: [@]?

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 02:43:12PM -0400, Little Girl wrote:
> 	[aside]
> 		Check out the very cool example of it being used with
> 		an associative array here:
> 		https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8880603/loop-through-an-array-of-strings-in-bash
> 	[/aside]
> 
> This is out of my element, though. I'm more of a Python person, but
> this is interesting, so I figured I'd jump in. Now I have to go find
> out if I can make this happen in Python.

This sort of thing is generally much easier in Python, since its quoting
and variable handling rules aren't completely ridiculous and arcane (and
I say that as somebody who did a lot of shell programming for many
years).  You'd have to go out of your way in Python *not* to handle
lists of strings in this completely reasonable way - the whole [@]
business is really just telling bash to expand an array variable and not
to do the weird historical shell thing of smashing everything together
into a single word.

The associative array example there in Python is just the obvious way
that dicts work there, with 90% less bizarre punctuation.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]