Working with dictionaries / hash maps / hash tables.
declare -A my_map
my_map=(
["first_name"]="John"
["last_name"]="Doe"
)
for el in ${!my_map[@]}; do
echo $el":" ${my_map[$el]}
done
Produces:
last_name: Doe
first_name: Joh
The odd looking exclamation mark in front of the my_map in the
for loop initialiser is to make BASH iterate over the keys and not the
values, which for some reason, are the values per default. You see
this easily if we change the for loop slightly:
for el in ${my_map[@]}; do
echo $el
done
The output then becomes:
Doe
John
