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    You can do the same thing awk does: emulate multi-dim arrays with single-dim associative arrays. Eg. declare -A a; i=2; j=3; a[$i,$j]=4; echo ${a[2,3]}. Of course, nicely iterating through rows and cols will be a bitch. But if you need to handle complex data structures, using bash is certainly not the best idea. Commented Oct 21, 2020 at 21:31
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    Or emulate them with indexed arrays: declare -a a; i=2; j=3; a[i<<16|j]=4; echo ${a[2<<16|3]} (assuming that 65536 x 65536 is enough for everybody ;-)). Commented Oct 21, 2020 at 21:39
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    In case it wasn't clear, the indexed arrays in bash are sparse; a[1<<30]=foo will NOT allocate 1G of empty slots. And like everything in bash, they're also very slow ;-) Commented Oct 21, 2020 at 22:00
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    The shell is not the type of language you usually want to use for things requiring multi-dimensional arrays. It may be more efficient to move to some other scripting language, such as Python, Perl, or any common compiled language. Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 6:17
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    @JeremyBoden If speed is not an issue, then why not just emulate a multi-dimensional array in a 1-dimensional array with a(i,j) == a[i*ncols + j] or similar transformation? This is a common way to do it when managing 1D structures is easier (or more efficient) than managing multi-D structures. Commented Oct 23, 2020 at 13:12