Hi. I made a post on this before but I haven't got a reply. I actually want to know what people think about the idea as I actually find a command like this really helpful. Anyone please?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:30 AM, konsolebox <konsole...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi. I was wondering if we could add a builtin where we could use it as an > alternative for assigning values to a parameter. And thought of a builtin > name called setvalue. With it we could assign values to a normal variable, > an array, or an associative array. > > For normal variables we could have the simple syntax: > > setvalue VARIABLE "something" > > For array variables: > > setvalue -a VARIABLE A B C D > > Or alternatively: > > setvalue -a VARIABLE "[1]=ABCD 1234" "[4]=WXYZ 7890" > > For associative array variables, we have need to have them in pairs: > > setvalue -A VARIABLE "Key1" "Value1" "Key2" "Value2" > > With this we could prevent using eval in situations like when we had to > assign values to passed custom variable names inside a function. We could > use declare or typeset but those builtin functions tend to create variables > as local by default and using the -g option would be confusing if the > intended use of the variable is local. > About accepting indices in indexed arrays by the way I also had the idea of adding the option -i to make it more consistent: setvalue -a -i VARIABLE "[1]=ABCD 1234" "[4]=WXYZ 7890" So setvalue would only only entertain indices if the option is added and just treat them as a normal part of the value if not. setvalue could also have alternative names like setval / setv / or set -V perhaps.
