Print array elements on separate lines in Bash?

Question

How do I print the array element of a Bash array on separate lines? This one works, but surely there is a better way:

$ my_array=(one two three)
$ for i in ${my_array[@]}; do echo $i; done
one
two
three

Tried this one but it did not work:

$ IFS=$'
' echo ${my_array[*]}
one two three

Answer 1

Try doing this :

$ printf '%s
' "${my_array[@]}"

The difference between $@ and $*:

• Unquoted, the results are unspecified. In Bash, both expand to separate args and then wordsplit and globbed.

• Quoted, "$@" expands each element as a separate argument, while "$*" expands to the args merged into one argument: "$1c$2c..." (where c is the first char of IFS).

You almost always want "$@". Same goes for "${arr[@]}".

Always quote them!