I was facing this issue of passing the array from php to the bash file. To pass array to bash file write the following lines of code.

Php Code:

$array= $countries_array; // Countries array from database
shell_exec('sh get_countries.sh '.join(' ',$array));

If your php variable $array is a php Array, you need to convert it to a string to do the call. For Example:

shell_exec('sh get_countries.sh '.join(' ',$array));

Then your countries.sh should look exactly like given below

#!/bin/bash
declare -a myArray
myArray=("$@") 
for arg in "${myArray[@]}"; do
 echo "$arg"
done

Make sure you have given permission to the file for execution with chmod a+rx countries.sh.

Here countries data will be displayed in bash file.