Recording name and source path of a file in a persistent storage in bash [duplicate]-CodePudding

I'm trying to write a backup and restore function for automation.

I'm struggling to populate the dictionary with path information.

Here's a snippet from the backup function.

    FILE="path/to/file"
    BASENAME=$(basename $FILE)

    key="$BASENAME"
    value="$FILE"
    test_dict[$key]=$value

    echo ${test_dict[*]}

I get this

    bash: package.json: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is ".json")

This is my first bash script and I'm not really fussed about what storage type I'm using, be it array, dictionary, etc... all I care about is to keep track of which file belongs where.

This is my first bash script so sorry if this is a trivial question/error on my side.

I'd really appreciate your input on this.

Cheers :)

Edit: test_dict is declared with:

    declare -a test_dict

CodePudding user response：

I got into all of this mess bc my shell won’t accept declare -A, which is to declare it as associative.

running bash --version spits out:

GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin20)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

all I had to do was to update bash to the latest version. For that I used: brew update && brew install bash

Now my code works just fine.

M :)