Allowed characters in linux environment variable names

Posted by Christian Semrau on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Christian Semrau
Published on 2010-05-12T17:03:58Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 17:14 UTC
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linux

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environment-variables

What characters are allowed in linux environment variable names? My cursory search of man pages and the web did only produce information about how to work with variables, but not which names are allowed.

I have a Java program that requires an defined environment variable containing a dot, like com.example.fancyproperty. With Windows I can set that variable, but I had no luck setting it in linux (tried in SuSE and Ubuntu). Is that variable name even allowed?

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