I've got a variable list of associative arrays that I want to iterate through and retrieve their key/value pairs. I iterate through a single associative array by listing all its keys and getting the values, ie. for key in "${!queue1[@]}" do echo "key : $key" echo "value : ${queue1[$key]}" done The tricky part is that the names of the associative arrays are variable variables, e.g. given count = 5, the associative arrays would be named queue1, queue2, queue3, queue4, queue5. I'm trying to replace the sequence above based on a count, but so far every combination of parentheses and eval has not yielded much more then bad substitution errors. e.g below: for count in {1,2,3,4,5} do for key in "${!queue${count}[@]}" do echo "key : $key" echo "value : ${queue${count}[$key]}" done done Help would be very much appreciated!