ron@rdk386.UUCP (Ron Kuris) (07/24/89)
Does anyone know what the definition of an "identifier" is in the bourne shell? I seem to be getting this nasty error message whenever I start up a bourne shell with some goop in my environment, and want to know what's legal and illegal in environment variable names, according to the bourne shell. Here's an example of something that fails royally on every machine that I've tried: 5@ csh % setenv \$\(x\) 1 % env MAIL=/usr/spool/mail/ron HOME=/u/ron PS1=!#@ TERM=ansi PATH=/u/ron/bin:/u/ron/fash%func:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:. HZ=50 SHELL=/bin/ash TZ=PST8PDT SHINIT=history -n 100 $(x)=1 % sh $(x)=1: is not an identifier % csh % exit % exit 6@ Does anyone have "sh" source so they can look it up? You can come up with a simpler case (just putting $=1 in your environment causes the shell to choke, for example). I looked through the sh(1) man page and the environ man page, and couldn't find anything about identifier restrictions. E-mail is preferred -- I'll summarize if asked. -- /-----------------------------------\/\/\/\ | {unify|{sactoh0!siva}}!rdk386!ron | o o | | uucp now, cu later. (Ron Kuris) | - | \-----------------------------------/ awk \