TIL: how to turn a Bash array into command arguments

Hey everyone, this is just a quick “today I learned” post to share how I was able to pass a Bash array of arguments to SQLite to execute something like the following:

sqlite3 :memory: -cmd 'PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON' -cmd '.version' 'SELECT strftime("%s")'

This technique isn’t specific to sqlite3, it was just what I was working with at the time when I figured this out, and I think it serves as a good example of it.

In case you’re curious, that creates an in-memory database, runs commands to turn on foreign key enforcement and print the version of SQLite you’re using, and then runs a query to compute the current Unix timestamp. Nothing too fancy, I just want to demonstrate that it works with spaces and quotation marks and all that.

Let’s start by defining our command array and query:

cmds=(
    'PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON'
    '.version'
)
query='SELECT strftime("%s")'

Just think of the query as an extra argument you’re passing if you’re not working with SQLite.

Now we need to build up our argument list. We can do that by separating each argument using a newline and passing them all to GNU xargs,¹ telling it we want to use those newlines as the delimiter between arguments. Thinking back to our use case, each command and the -cmd preceding it are their own arguments, so we need newlines in between each of those too.

It’s probably not the cleanest way to do it but here’s how I accomplished that:

(
    echo :memory:
    printf -- "-cmd\n%s\n" "${cmds[@]}"
    echo "$query"
) | xargs -d "\n" sqlite3

The newlines are being added both at the end of the echo invocations and in the printf invocation; see the \ns in the format string? The -- right before that format string is telling printf to not parse the - in the format string as the beginning of an option for it (printf) to interpret. If you’re curious what you’re feeding to xargs, try piping to cat instead!

I’m not a Bash (or SQLite) expert, but I hope I helped you a little with whatever you’re working on!