Does pdksh (public domain korn shell) 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 Korn shell and learned that it supports associative arrays, so I installed Cygwin's pdksh (public domain korn shell).

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'll be considering Perl instead, but I really wanted a good excuse to learn a dialect/language new to me

Answer 1

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

Alternatively, zsh has excellent associative array support.

Answer 2

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

See: kornshell.com