结合Beorn Harris和loentar的回答，我们得出了一个更有趣的单行测试:

delim=$'\x1F' # define a control code to be used as more or less reliable delimiter
if [[ "${delim}${array[@]}${delim}" =~ "${delim}a string to test${delim}" ]]; then
    echo "contains 'a string to test'"
fi

它不使用额外的函数，不替换测试，并添加了额外的保护，防止使用控制代码作为分隔符偶尔出现错误匹配。

UPD:感谢@ChrisCogdon的注意，这个错误的代码被重写并以https://stackoverflow.com/a/58527681/972463的形式发布。

没有'grep'和循环的一行检查

if ( dlm=$'\x1F' ; IFS="$dlm" ; [[ "$dlm${array[*]}$dlm" == *"$dlm${item}$dlm"* ]] ) ; then
  echo "array contains '$item'"
else
  echo "array does not contain '$item'"
fi

这种方法既不使用grep这样的外部实用程序，也不使用循环。

这里发生的是:

we use a wildcard substring matcher to find our item in the array that is concatenated into a string; we cut off possible false positives by enclosing our search item between a pair of delimiters; we use a non-printable character as delimiter, to be on the safe side; we achieve our delimiter being used for array concatenation too by temporary replacement of the IFS variable value; we make this IFS value replacement temporary by evaluating our conditional expression in a sub-shell (inside a pair of parentheses)

借鉴Dennis Williamson的答案，下面的解决方案结合了数组、shell-safe引号和正则表达式，以避免需要:遍历循环;使用管道或其他子过程;或者使用非bash实用程序。

declare -a array=('hello, stack' one 'two words' words last)
printf -v array_str -- ',,%q' "${array[@]}"

if [[ "${array_str},," =~ ,,words,, ]]
then
   echo 'Matches'
else
   echo "Doesn't match"
fi

上面的代码通过使用Bash正则表达式来匹配数组内容的字符串化版本。有六个重要的步骤来确保正则表达式匹配不会被数组中的值的巧妙组合所欺骗:

Construct the comparison string by using Bash's built-in printf shell-quoting, %q. Shell-quoting will ensure that special characters become "shell-safe" by being escaped with backslash \. Choose a special character to serve as a value delimiter. The delimiter HAS to be one of the special characters that will become escaped when using %q; that's the only way to guarantee that values within the array can't be constructed in clever ways to fool the regular expression match. I choose comma , because that character is the safest when eval'd or misused in an otherwise unexpected way. Combine all array elements into a single string, using two instances of the special character to serve as delimiter. Using comma as an example, I used ,,%q as the argument to printf. This is important because two instances of the special character can only appear next to each other when they appear as the delimiter; all other instances of the special character will be escaped. Append two trailing instances of the delimiter to the string, to allow matches against the last element of the array. Thus, instead of comparing against ${array_str}, compare against ${array_str},,. If the target string you're searching for is supplied by a user variable, you must escape all instances of the special character with a backslash. Otherwise, the regular expression match becomes vulnerable to being fooled by cleverly-crafted array elements. Perform a Bash regular expression match against the string.

OP自己添加了以下答案，并附上了评论:

在回答和评论的帮助下，经过一些测试，我得出了这个结论:

function contains() {
    local n=$#
    local value=${!n}
    for ((i=1;i < $#;i++)) {
        if [ "${!i}" == "${value}" ]; then
            echo "y"
            return 0
        fi
    }
    echo "n"
    return 1
}

A=("one" "two" "three four")
if [ $(contains "${A[@]}" "one") == "y" ]; then
    echo "contains one"
fi
if [ $(contains "${A[@]}" "three") == "y" ]; then
    echo "contains three"
fi

下面的代码检查给定值是否在数组中，并返回其从零开始的偏移量:

A=("one" "two" "three four")
VALUE="two"

if [[ "$(declare -p A)" =~ '['([0-9]+)']="'$VALUE'"' ]];then
  echo "Found $VALUE at offset ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
else
  echo "Couldn't find $VALUE"
fi

匹配是在完整的值上完成的，因此设置VALUE="three"将不匹配。

containsElement () { for e in "${@:2}"; do [[ "$e" = "$1" ]] && return 0; done; return 1; }

现在正确处理空数组。