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Does pdksh (public domain kornShell) support associative arrays?

I recently ran up against a wall doing some bash shell programming where an associative array would have solved my problems. I googled about features of the KornShell (ksh) and learned that it supports associative arrays, so I installed Cygwin's pdksh (Public Domain KornShell).

However, when trying to create an associative array in the prescribed manner (typeset -A varName), I received the following errors, so I'm beginning to suspect pdksh does not support associative arrays.

./find_actions.ksh: line 2: typeset: -A: invalid option
typeset: usage: typeset [-afFirtx] [-p] name[=value] ...

Guess I will be considering Perl instead, but I really wanted a good excuse to learn a dialect/language new to me.

Solution

  • Take a look at ksh93, it supports associative arrays and is a much more complete/correct implementation of ksh.

    See: kornshell.com