Create associative array in bash 3

Question

After thoroughly searching for a way to create an associative array in bash, I found that declare -A array will do the trick. But the problem is, it is only for

Answer 1

You can write the key-value pairs to a file and then grep by key. If you use a pattern like

key=value

then you can egrep for ^key= which makes this pretty safe.

To "overwrite" a value, just append the new value at the end of the file and use tail -1 to get just the last result of egrep

Alternatively, you can put this information into a normal array using key=value as value for the array and then iterator over the array to find the value.