i'm writing a script that has a list of variables, and i'll frequently need to go through them all to check if they've occured before

is the best way to do this to use a separate variable for each? one variable that's comma separated? a separate file list?

/help hash tables

the fact that they're temporary/not on disk doesn't seem appropriate in this case what would i use if i need them to be more permanent?

You can save the hash tables as needed, but other than that your only built in options are ini files (you can save and load hash tables as ini files) and global variables.