How can I use a Bash array as input to a command?

Say, for example, I have the following arra开发者_如何学Pythony:

files=( "foo" "bar" "baz fizzle" )

I want to pipe the contents of this array through a command, say sort, as though each element where a line in a file. Sure, I could write the array to a temporary file, then use the temporary file as input to sort, but I'd like to avoid using a temporary file if possible.

If "bar fizzle" didn't have that space character, I could do something like this:

echo ${files[@]} | tr ' ' '\012' | sort

Any ideas? Thanks!

sort <(for f in "${files[@]}" ; do echo "$f" ; done)

Yet another solution:

printf "%s\n" "${files[@]}" | sort

SAVE_IFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
echo "${files[*]}" | sort
IFS=$SAVE_IFS

Of course it won't work properly if there are any newlines in array values.

For sorting files I would recommend sorting in zero-terminated mode (to avoid errors in case of embedded newlines in file names or paths):

files=(
$'fileNameWithEmbeddedNewline\n.txt'
$'saneFileName.txt'
)

echo ${#files[@]}

sort <(for f in "${files[@]}" ; do printf '%s\n' "$((i+=1)): $f" ; done)
sort -z <(for f in "${files[@]}" ; do printf '%s\000' "$((i+=1)): $f" ; done) | tr '\0' '\n'

printf "%s\000" "${files[@]}" | sort -z | tr '\0' '\n'
find . -type f -print0 | sort -z | tr '\0' '\n'

sort -z reads & writes zero-terminated lines!