Re: Invalid shell assignments in environment

[Joerg.Schilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Joerg Schilling)]

Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

> > I will do whatever the standard requires.  I would like
> > to hear argument on both sides.
>
> Interesting.  I changed it the other way because I got a bug report
> about bash creating invalid variables if such names appeared in the
> environment.  Since bash uses its table of variables and functions
> to create the export environment, the "passing along" stopped as a
> side effect.

My shell (bsh) passes environment variable regardless of the names.
This was never changed during the past 25 years.

> There are a growing number of applications that attempt to take
> advantage of this and use environment variable names that are not
> valid shell variable names.

This does not sound reasonable. If you use environemnt variables, you expect 
them to be propagates to child processes - otherwise they would not make sense.
If the related behavior is different when a shell process is used as 
intermediate for creating the child (e.g. via make), it sems to be just 
unreliable behavior.

Jörg

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