Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Arrays and associative arrays

Arrays allow a script to store a collection of data as separate entities using indices. Bash supports both regular arrays that use integers as the array index, and associative arrays, which use a string as the array index. Regular arrays should be used when the data is organized numerically, for example, a set of successive iterations. Associative arrays can be used when the data is organized by a string, for example, host names. In this recipe, we will see how to use both of these.