Associative Arrays in Bash - What is an Associative Array and to Declare it

A little background:

So recently I was working a project where I had to implement some new features. The project was primarily written in BASH. While I love BASH it’s for simpler tasks, or at least this is what I thought.

What is an Associative array:

In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an abstract data type composed of a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection.

I’ve used associative arrays in different projects when I had to work with PHP, Python, and other languages but never with BASH, I didn’t even know it was possible.

In this mini-tutorial, I’ll go over exactly that, associative arrays in BASH, how to control, populate it, how to define and use them.