significance of '$' prefix to Envrironment variables

zulfi123786 · Post by **zulfi123786** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 12:47 am

Is the '$' prefixed to environment variables just to distinguish them from the user defined job parameters or is there any underlying reason ?

pandeesh · Post by **pandeesh** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 1:03 am

yes..There's no other significance as i guess.
From what i recall, $ is automatically added even if you omit.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 7:17 am

You'd probably need a time machine and a trip back to the 60's to find out the reasons behind fundamental things like this. Before UNIX were fun things like Multics and RUNCOM. Some history here including the interesting note that "Unix" was a joke name someone made up that stuck.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 5:10 pm

TMPDIR is the name of an environment variable.
$TMPDIR is a reference to the current value of that environment variable.

Any variation to that is laziness or ignorance.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 10:06 pm

I went down the "why is it a dollar sign" path, this rather than @ or % or something else entirely...

pandeesh · Post by **pandeesh** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 12:38 am

% is the one what we used to refer in windows systems