On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 02:02:02PM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote: > I was wondering if I was missing some syntax somewhere... > but I wanted to be able to pass the name of a hash in > and store stuff in it and later retrieve it... but it > looks like it's only possible with an eval or such?
Passing arrays "by reference" (by name) to a function will be possible in bash 4.3. It is not possible in current versions of bash, without using eval trickery, as you have already noted. And doing it with eval is so difficult that it's easier to switch languages entirely.