Here's a very little thing that's annoying me. I have a fairly long function where the result is stored in an array called "mylines". I want the function to return normally (status zero) if "mylines" contains at least one non-empty element, and with non-zero otherwise. This is the best I've come up with so far: mylines=... mylines=(${mylines}) # Remove empty elements return $(( ${#mylines} == 0 )) I particularly dislike that I have a separate line to remove empty lines. Is there a more elegant, preferably one-line, solution to achieve this?