Is there a way to create key-value pairs in Bash script?

If you can use a simple delimiter, a very simple oneliner is this:

for i in a,b c_s,d ; do 
  KEY=${i%,*};
  VAL=${i#*,};
  echo $KEY" XX "$VAL;
done

Hereby i is filled with character sequences like "a,b" and "c_s,d". each separated by spaces. After the do we use parameter substitution to extract the part before the comma , and the part after it.

In bash, we use

declare -A name_of_dictonary_variable

so that Bash understands it is a dictionary.

For e.g. you want to create sounds dictionary then,

declare -A sounds

sounds[dog]="Bark"

sounds[wolf]="Howl"

where dog and wolf are "keys", and Bark and Howl are "values".

You can access all values using : echo ${sounds[@]} OR echo ${sounds[*]}

You can access all keys only using: echo ${!sounds[@]}

And if you want any value for a particular key, you can use:

${sounds[dog]}

this will give you value (Bark) for key (dog).

In bash version 4 associative arrays were introduced.

declare -A arr

arr["key1"]=val1

arr+=( ["key2"]=val2 ["key3"]=val3 )

The arr array now contains the three key value pairs. Bash is fairly limited what you can do with them though, no sorting or popping etc.

for key in ${!arr[@]}; do
    echo ${key} ${arr[${key}]}
done

Will loop over all key values and echo them out.

Note: Bash 4 does not come with Mac OS X because of its GPLv3 license; you have to download and install it. For more on that see here