Korn Shell: Unix and Linux Programming Manual, Third Edition, The

Compound Variables

The Korn shell also supports compound variables, which are similar to structures or records in other languages, that is a meta-datatype which is a group of related values, each of which can have a different data type. The syntax for declaring compund variables is:

					compound_variable=(
					[datatype]
					field1[=value]
					. . .
					[datatype]
					fieldn[=value]
					)
				

For example, we can use a compound variable to manage employee information:

					$ employee=(
					typeset name=Allenby
					integer id=1243
					float salary=9000.50
					)
				

The syntax to display the value of a compound variable field is:

					${compound_variable.field}
				

Here we access the employee compound variable:

					$ print $employee
					( typeset -E salary=9000.5 name=Allenby typeset -i
					id=1243 )
					$ print ${employee.name} ...