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?
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.
If you can use a simple delimiter, a very simple oneliner is this:
for i in a,b c_s,d ; do
KEY=${i%,*};
VAL=${i#*,};
echo $KEY" XX "$VAL;
done
Hereby i
is filled with character sequences like "a,b"
and "c_s,d"
. each separated by spaces. After the do
we use parameter substitution to extract the part before the comma ,
and the part after it.
For persistent key/value storage, you can use kv-bash
, a pure bash implementation of key/value database available at https://github.com/damphat/kv-bash
Usage
git clone https://github.com/damphat/kv-bash
source kv-bash/kv-bash
Try create some permanent variables
kvset myName xyz
kvset myEmail xyz@example.com
#read the varible
kvget myEmail
#you can also use in another script with $(kvget keyname)
echo $(kvget myEmail)