environment variable name converted to upper case

[Shankar Unni]

Larry Hall wrote:

> I'm not sure what you mean by 'Posix shells'.  Shells that come with the
> Cygwin environment don't expect uppercase.  Windows (and DOS) do, really.

OK, I was a little imprecise.

What I was trying to say was that NT *shells* preserves case in 
environment variables, but is case-insensitive in lookup. Which is why 
it allows variables like "Path" or "PATH" interchangeably. You can set 
"foo", but look up "%FoO%" or "%fOo", and it'll find that "foo" and 
return it. But just "set" prints out "foo=...", not "FOO=...".

"Posix shells" (OK, another bad term - I mean shells originally written 
to run on Unix-y or Posix-y systems - i.e. sh, bash, ksh, csh, etc., but 
not CMD, COMMAND.COM, 4NT, or others), on the other hand, are completely 
case-preserving and case-sensitive.

And in order to be able to see PATH in the environment in cygwin shells 
when the system had set Path, cygwin uppercases all environment vars 
when starting a cygwin process. What I was saying was, how about 
uppercasing just "Path/PATH"? We can leave the case of the others alone, 
as they are in the system environment.

OK, sure, there's minor complexity in saying

   if (stricmp(var, "path") == 0)
     uppercase(var)

instead of just

   uppercase(var)

but it reduces the needless element of surprise at the unnecessary 
munging of the environment.

Anyway, not a big point; just a suggestion, and it looks like it's been 
shot down. That's ok..


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