To use associative arrays in shell scripting, you need to declare them with the declare -A command, followed by the name of the array. For example, declare -A colors declares an associative array ...

Figure 3: This is how you declare a multi-dimensional array. What if I wanted to retrieve a value from the array? Well, the key to doing so is to understand that the rows and columns are numbered.

These arrays employ numeric values — 1, 2, 3 and so on — as their indices. Since most scripting and programming languages start indexed arrays with element 0, we have done so in the examples ...