Bash: all of array except last element

Question

Bash has a neat way of giving all elements in an array except the first:

\"${a[@]:1}\"           

To get all except the last I have found:<

Answer 1

I am not sure how much improvement it would be, but you can drop the arithmetic operator ($(())) and starting index (0 here):

${a[@]::${#a[@]}-1}

So:

$ foo=( 1 2 3 )

$ echo "${foo[@]::${#foo[@]}-1}"
1 2

As you can see, the improvement is purely syntactical; the idea remains the same.