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Re: Unusual environemtal variables
- From: "Ehud Karni" <ehud at unix dot mvs dot co dot il>
- To: ebb9 at byu dot net
- Cc: cygwin at cygwin dot com, steve dot rainbird at mssint dot com
- Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:06:21 +0200
- Subject: Re: Unusual environemtal variables
- References: <gifp4m$u1t$1@ger.gmane.org> <494BA56A.7070009@byu.net>
- Reply-to: ehud at unix dot mvs dot co dot il
On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:45:14 -0700, Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net> wrote:
>
> According to Steve Rainbird on 12/19/2008 2:22 AM:
> SR:> When i run a Fuijitsu Cobol program it requires environmental variables
> SR:> starting with the @ sign.
>
> That is inherently non-portable. POSIX states that "Other characters may
> be permitted by an implementation; applications shall tolerate the
> presence of such names," but does not require applications to be able to
> create such names.
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html#tag_08
>
> SR:>
> SR:> Is there any way around this?
>
> You'll have to set it in Windows, prior to starting bash, as there is no
> way to make bash create variables not starting with something from the
> portable set [_a-zA-Z].
This behavior (accepting names of only ASCII Alpha and _) is a bash self
imposed limitation. If you use csh (or tcsh) names with other characters
are supported too.
So you can use csh's: setenv "@FOO" "value".
You can also use the env command to bypass bash limitation like this:
exec env "@FOO=bar" exec /bin/bash -i
Note the 2 `exec' if you do not want to spawn more processes.
Ehud.
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