mjhjmtu

So I have the following:

cat file | grep -E regex 

which gives a list of lines

Now I also have a for loop the produces a list of files

So it is like I have 2 arrays.

But how do I check in bash if both arrays have the same content? My bash version does not support associative arrays (4.2).

Should I find another way other than bash or is it doable with bash easily too?

Update

I go over for i in foo/bar/* and record the paths so I essentially I have somewhere:

foo/bar/a/b 
foo/bar/c/d 
foo/bar/e etc 

So I essentially just want to re-run the for loop and check that I get exactly the same outcome.

Assuming your arrays are named "array1" and "array2", bash code to check for equality:

equal=true
if [[ $#array1[@] -ne $#array2[@] ]]; then
 equal=false
else
 while IFS= read -r elem1 <&3; IFS= read -r elem2 <&4; do
 if [[ "$elem1" != "$elem2" ]]; then
 equal=false
 break
 fi
 done 3< <(printf "%sn" "$array1[@]" | sort) 
 4< <(printf "%sn" "$array2[@]" | sort)
fi
if $equal; then
 echo arrays have the same contents
else
 echo arrays have different contents
fi

This will be (probably "much") slower than calling out to external tools.

diff <(grep -E regex file1) <(grep -E regex file2)