In any programming language, a dictionary is one of the most fundamental data structures that can store a set of objects in the form of key-value pairs. While bash is not a general-purpose programming language, a recent version of bash (starting from version 4) has started to support dictionaries or associative arrays natively. This tutorial demonstrates how you can use a key-value dictionary in bash.

Source: LXer – How to use a key-value dictionary in bash