On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 12:04:14PM -0400, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote: > Drop the qotes: > > declare -A foo=( [a]=5 )
That misses the point. The original poster was trying to initialize an associative array using key/value pairs that were being fed through a substitution. Like this, but using command substitution from a function instead: imadev:~$ x='[a]=5' imadev:~$ unset foo imadev:~$ declare -A foo=( $x ) bash: foo: [a]=5: must use subscript when assigning associative array Doing this requires eval, but I would not do that. I'd rewrite the code so that I don't have to do this in the first place.
