Does pdksh (public domain kornShell) support associative arrays?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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

See: kornshell.com

Answer 2

pdksh doesn't have any support for associative arrays; it’s a planned and definite feature of its successor, mksh (as soon as I get around to actually implementing it, that is… sorry for being slow with that).

Answer 3

Why not just use bash? It might not have explicit associative arrays, but you can fake them.

Alternatively, zsh has excellent associative array support.