Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> writes: > All-caps names are reserved for environment variables (HOME, PATH), > and internal shell variables (IFS, PWD, HISTFILE). > > Avoiding all-caps names allows you to avoid collisions with a variable > name that might be used for something else. Most of the time. This > being the Unix shell, there are *always* stupid exceptions (http_proxy > and friends on the environment side, and auto_resume and histchars in > bash).
Thank you. I learned something today that I didn't expect to learn which is why I posted the question in the first place. I just wasn't thinking, I guess and used the all-caps names to indicate that they stood for files. If one collided with an environment variable name, it could make the script fail in strange ways that would be totally unpredictable, depending on which variable one preempted. Martin
