Cygwin automatically converts all Windows environment variable names to uppercase. The attached patch allows users to control this behavior by specifying an option in the CYGWIN environment variable: (no)uppercase_env. The default for this option will be "SET", so that Cygwin's default behavior is the same as always. Adding "nouppercase_env" to the CYGWIN environment variable will cause Cygwin to leave environment variable names in the same state as they are defined in the Windows environment (except for PATH, which will be uppercased as before).
My company has a product which includes a number of shell scripts. We've bundled our product with a commercial product which provided the shell functionality, and this product did not uppercase environment variables. We'd like to rebase our product on Cygwin, and the ability to turn off the auto-uppercase behavior would make this a much easier prospect. While it would be possible to port the scripts and change variable names, there are issues that make this more complicated than it first seems. For instance, we remotely execute scripts on other systems running our product, so during an upgrade it's possible that the shell would be running in the old environment. Referring to uppercase variable names would break in this case. Again, we could do something to check the environmnent and use the correct version of the variable name, but making Cygwin understand our existing scripts is a more desirable solution. I have briefly discussed this with Christopher Faylor, who has some reservations about this functionality. His comments were: ============= I should point out that a few people have submitted similar patches over the years and they have been rejected. There are other ways to do what you want to do which do not involve adding an option and slowing down cygwin's startup. We tend to be pretty stingy when it comes to adding new options to the CYGWIN environment variable. But, if you want to discuss this, then cygwin-patches would be the place to do so. You can quote this email there, if you want. ============== I can understand the reluctance to add more and more options to the CYGWIN environment variable. I hope that the Cygwin community sees enough value in the ability to control this aspect of Cygwin that this modification is accepted. I don't believe that there is any real performance impact with this change - at most the code costs a few extra machine cycles, but certainly nothing noticeable. Thanks for considering this modification. ----- Ernie Coskrey SteelEye Technology, Inc. 803-461-3875
uppercase_env.patch
Description: uppercase_env.patch
