bash env variable containing @

Yogesh_Sawant · December 20, 2006, 2:25am

I want to set a bash env variable which has @ in its name, for example, @YOGESH@

may i know how do i do this?

vino · December 20, 2006, 2:55am

Did you try

export yogesh='@YOGESH@'

Yogesh_Sawant · December 20, 2006, 3:02am

pardon for the earlier confusion, i wish to have @yogesh@ as the name of the variable, not its value. is that possible in any way?

vino · December 20, 2006, 5:47am

I am not sure if you can actually do that.

Perderabo · December 20, 2006, 5:51am

The Posix Standard says of shell variables:

So you cannot have a variable like @yogesh@. A specialized C program can add a string like @yogesh@=something to the environment and the Posix Standard say:

So it is possible that your version of unix will allow this and it is possible that it won't. If allowed, a C program would be able to use getenv() to obtain the value. bash certainly won't be able to access it though. This would be a very strange thing to do.