Compound Variables

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	Korn Shell: Unix and Linux Programming Manual, Third Edition, The By Anatole Olczak
	Table of Contents
	Chapter 3.  Variables and Parameters

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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}         Allenby 

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