We have a few ways to fiddle with variables, and some of these have a really interesting use in scripts, as we will see later on in this book. Let's briefly recap what we can do with variables and how to do it, but remember we are dealing with values that are returned, not assigned back to the variable:
${#variable)
It gives us the length of the variable, or if it is an array, the length of the first element of an array. Here is an example:
zarrelli:~$ my_variable=thisisaverylongvaluezarrelli:~$ echo ${#my_variable}20
And indeed thisisaverylongvalue is made up of 20 characters. Now, let us see an example with arrays:
zarrelli:~$ fruit=(apple pear banana)
Here, we instantiated an array with three elements ...
