The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" ...

In Bash, a hash is a data structure that can contain many sub-variables, of the same or different kinds, but indexes them with user-defined text strings, or keys, instead of fixed numeric identifiers.

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they ...