[ILUG] Bourne[-again] shell

[Lars Hecking]

Peter Flynn writes:
> How's your shell? I have a script with variables
> 
> SURNAME1=foo
> SURNAME2=bar
> etc
> SURNAME9=blort
> 
> and I want to reference these in a loop. My bash is rusty,
> to say the least, and I don't do Perl.
> 
> while [ something]; do
> 
> COUNTER=(some function which increments the counter)
> 
> do something with ${SURNAME$COUNTER}
>                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is causing an error

 "${SURNAME}${COUNTER}" maybe?

> done
> 
> 
> The error says "bad substitution" but I can't see why. Or is
> there something non-obvious needs to be done to the $COUNTER
> to force it to evaluate and catenate with the string SURNAME?