Subject: Re: bash export problem
From: [email-masked] (Fergus Henderson)

7 Mar 1997 19:50:52 -0800
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
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Original-Cc: [email-masked] (gnu-win32)
In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]> from "Christoph Kukulies" at Mar 7, 97 09:16:46 am
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Christoph Kukulies, you wrote:
> 
> > Christoph Kukulies wrote:
> > 
> > > The escape strings are not exported to the environment, i.e., they are
> > > empty.
> > 
> > cygwin upcases all environment names.
> 
> Huh? Is this a DOS resp. NT mandate? 

Here's what the source code says (this is from `src/winsup/dcrt0.cc'):

    /* Amazingly, NT has a case sensitive environment name list,
       only sometimes.
       eg, it's normal to have NT set your "Path" to something.
       Later, you set "PATH" to something else.  This alters "Path".
       But if you try and do a naive getenv on "PATH" you'll get nothing. 
       
       So we upper case the labels here to prevent confusion later. */

I think a case-insensitive getenv() would be better.
The current approach breaks all code using lower-case environment
variables to communicate between processes, whereas a case-insensitive
getenv() would only break code that used both upper and lower case
versions of the same name.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <[email-masked]>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [email-masked]         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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