Question

I am trying to create a dictionary of key value pair using Bash script. I am trying using this logic:

declare -d dictionary
defaults write "$dictionary" key -string "$value"

…where $dictionary is a variable, but this is not working.

Is there a way to create key-value pairs in Bash script?

Answer 1

In bash version 4 associative arrays were introduced.

declare -A arr

arr["key1"]=val1

arr+=( ["key2"]=val2 ["key3"]=val3 )

The arr array now contains the three key value pairs. Bash is fairly limited what you can do with them though, no sorting or popping etc.

for key in ${!arr[@]}; do
    echo ${key} ${arr[${key}]}
done

Will loop over all key values and echo them out.

Note: Bash 4 does not come with Mac OS X because of its GPLv3 license; you have to download and install it. For more on that see here