Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Associative arrays in Awk

Awk supports variables that contain a number or string and also supports associative arrays. An associative array is an array that's indexed by strings instead of numbers. You can recognize an associative array by the index within square brackets:

    arrayName[index]

An array can be assigned a value with the equal sign, just like simple user-defined variables:

    myarray[index]=value