I just came across this nice way of verifying if a list contains a specific element in bash.
containsElement () { for e in "${@:2}"; do [[ "$e" = "$1" ]] && return 0; done; return 1; } a_list=("foo" "bar") if containsElement "$1" "${a_list[@]}"; then echo "$1 found in a_list!" fi
kudos to the op of this solution : stackoverflow