Suppose you wanted to do the following in bash: for label in a b c d e f do variable_${label}=${label} done This has the intended result of setting a series of variables: variable_a variable_b variable_c variable_d variable_e variable_f But if what if you want to dereference them programatically? for label in a b c d e f do echo ${variable_${label}} done is not acceptable bash syntax. But there is a way... We can abuse export and env . We set them with: for label in a b c d e f do export variable_${label}=${label} done We can then programmatically dereference the variables by searching for them in the output of env and using awk to get their value. for label in a b c d e f do echo "`env | grep variable_${label} | awk -F= '{print $2}'`" done How's that for bash abuse?
Systems, tools, and observations.