Case handling of environment variables

Shankar Unni shankarunni@netscape.net
Sun Feb 27 16:04:00 GMT 2005


Volker Quetschke wrote:

> Can anyone point me to a message/webpage that explaines the reason
> for this conversion? Unfortunately I didn't find any explanation
> in the archives or the FAQ or the User's Guide.

The biggest reason is PATH. Most (all) POSIX programs will look for the 
environment variable in that specific case, so PATH definitely has to be 
up-cased for Cygwin programs.  The other one is HOME, but that's usually 
synthesized or set explicitly anyway (not like to find an existing 
"Home" environment variable on Windows).

The others shouldn't matter, really - none are really common to Windows 
and POSIX. I guess because there's a *convention* that environment 
variables are declared in uppercase on Unix-y boxes.


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