bash - Is it possible to create variable that has a variable as its title and has a string value with other variables in?

Question

I have an array and i am looping through the variable to run other commands. The last thing i need to do with the array value before going onto the next one is create a variable with the array value as the name and assign a string that includes other variables inside.

Currently my code looks like this:

for i in ${array[@]} do
    some command
    $i_value="my string including other variables ${other_variable}"
done
echo $i_value

when i run this i get the following error and i dont know why its looking for a file and not creating a variable with the array value (which its getting):

line 5: *value*_value=my string including other variables *other_variable*: no such file or directory.

Answer 1

If you don't have an external need to create variables foo_value, bar_value etc., but only need them within the script, you should probably use an associative array instead. Like so:

declare -A values
for i in "${array[@]}"; do
    # some commands...
    values[$i]="my string including other variables ${other_variable}"
done
echo "${values[$i]}"

# loop over the keys:
for key in "${!values[@]}"; do
    echo "values has key '$key'"
done

(Note that you want to put quotes around "${array[@]}" to deal with values containing whitespace and glob characters correctly; and you need to have a semicolon before do in for i in ...; do.)

Answer 2

Just use export builtin ...

Example (with bonus: use of dynamic variable name for accessing ;-p)

~$ cat test.sh 
#!/bin/bash

toto="coincoin"
tata="cuicui"

for var in toto tata; do
    export coincoin_${!var}="${var}"
done

echo "${coincoin_cuicui}"
echo "${coincoin_coincoin}"

~$ ./test.sh 
tata
toto