$cat arraymanip.sh

#!/bin/bash

Unix=('Debian' 'Red hat' 'Ubuntu' 'Suse' 'Fedora' 'UTS' 'OpenLinux' 'HP-UX');

echo ${Unix[@]/Ubuntu/SCO Unix}

$./arraymanip.sh

Debian Red hat SCO Unix Suse Fedora UTS OpenLinux

##################################

So I decided to try creating a new array and replacing what I don't want with nothing by doing the following:

tmpArray=( ${Unix[@]/deleteme/} )

Unix=("${tmpArray[@]}")

So far this has worked great, but I've run into a problem. Say I have 'HP' and 'HP-UX' in my array and I want to remove the 'HP', so I would do

at first glance this worked fine, until I realized that now, instead of 'HP-UX' in my array, I now have '-UX'

It seems to replace all instances, which is what I want, but the pattern matches even in this example, which is what I don't want.

Following his tutorial, I would need to know the number of the element in the array I want to delete, but my problem is there may be 10 instances in the array of 'HP' and I want to delete them all, so I would need to loop through it over and over until all instances are gone. Also, the elements inserted into the array are variables and I don't necessarily know the order of the elements, so I cannot just tell it to delete element X like in his example. The array is not static anywhere in my script.

So how do I remove something from an array without having to run through every element in an array and test for whole matches? My array might be 100 elements large, which can take a LONG time to loop through when I am adding or removing another hundred items to the array. I liked this pattern replace because it was fast, I don't want to lose my speed now!

Thanks for your help.