To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest version of the Korn shell (referred to as “korn93”) supports associative arrays.

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they ...

The types of array we have been working with above are referred to as “indexed arrays”. These arrays employ numeric values — 1, 2, 3 and so on — as their indices.