Q: shellschock - bash bug

As much as I have used AWK, I knew what associative arrays are, but posted above script with incorrect usage for the nomenclature. D'oh.

The following works with Bash v3.2.53 on OS X 10.9.5. There is no explicit -A support in this version of Bash.

Modifying my script to use the ShellShock patched /bin/bash and lower case -a I get the following results:

/bin/bash --version

GNU bash, version 3.2.53(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13)

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

/bin/bash not_so_associative_array_example.sh  # run the example

xyz

0

xyz

xyz

It should be:

def xyz

abc_key qrs_key

def

xyz

I think it just treated foo as index zero in your example, and in my example "abc_key" and "qrs_key" were also treated as zero, so the last thing stored in array element 0 was the value returned.

As much as I have used AWK,...

It is always nice to find someone else that likes awk.  So many people do not appreciate awk, and at most use it just to pick a field out of a string, or worse they insist on doing "cat file | awk '...'" instead of "awk '...' file".  Anyway, I do like to find people that like awk.