Check out the
Advanced Bash Scripting Guide. Specifically Examples 26-4 and 26-5. Using it as a guide, I think that what you are wanting is ...
Code:
for element in $(seq 0 $((${#stripped_file[@]} - 1 )))
do
#whatever you want to do using ${stripped_file[$element]}
done
seq will return a sequence of numbers from begin to end. Begin in this case is 0, and end is the number of elements in the $array array minus one. The for loop then assigns each number of that sequence in turn to element.
To change a single element array into a multi-element ...
Code:
new_array=($(echo $old_array))
assuming that $old_array is your single element array.