As I'm sure everybody knows, Bash is the only shell that supports indexed arrays but maps the option for reading fields to -a rather than -A. I realize that "read -A" was an unfortunate, confusing choice in contrast to "typeset -a", but this is a feature that I use in almost every script, and would "just work" everywhere if it wasn't for the backwards option. Could we just add it as an alternate?
A real proper wrapper around read to fix this in a script requires a full-on option parser to handle both "-a x" and "-ax" forms. Ideally it also has to fix the collision with the coprocess feature in at least 3 other implementations and translate between "var?prompt" and "-p prompt". Also "-i default" <-> "var=default; read -v var" (ksh93). I have such a function of course, but don't care to make every script depend on it. The -a/-A problem is definitely the most common and annoying of these though and the -A would be very useful even if left undocumented or marked as deprecated. -- Dan Douglas
