BashHashes

bash 4.x has associative arrays (hashes if you are an old perl user like me). The existing examples of how to use them on the internet are kind of garbage.

example 1: use a while/read loop to process a file line by line

while read line; do
  foo=awk blah
  bar=awk blarg
done < file.txt

example 2: same, but process the contents of a multiline variable:

while read line; do
  foo=awk blah
  bar=awk blarg
done <<< $data

turn those in to hashes, demonstrate how to manipulate them.

explain that bang means 'hash key' and no bang means 'hash value'.

need to also write up an example of mapfile

apologize profusely for doing all this.