Complicated behaviors of the compound system with periodic switches between two nonlinear systems are investigated in detail. Through the local analysis, the critical conditions such as fold bifurcation and Hopf bifurcation are derived to explore the bifurcations of the compound systems with different stable solutions in the two subsystems. Different types of oscillations of the switched system are observed of which, the mechanism is presented to show that the trajectories of the oscillations can be divided into several parts by the switching points, governed by the two subsystems, respectively. With the variation of the parameters, cascading of doubling increase of the switching points can be obtained, leading to chaos via period-doubling bifurcations. Furthermore, because of the non-smooth characteristics at the switching points, different forms of bifurcations may occur in the compound system, which may result in complicated dynamics such as chaotic oscillations, instead of the simple connections between the trajectories of the two subsystems.