CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaenvironment-variables
Adriano Hernandez III
Adriano Hernandez III

Reputation: 91

Are values of environment variables case-sensitive?

I have a job that gets new records from an application then saves it to its local database. However, it's not seeing the new record.

I checked the job and its properties, specifically, the environment.properties and it looks like this:

VARIABLE_NAME=variable_value

The value of the variables don't have quotation marks. I wonder if the values inside the variables are case sensitive? Because the application that the job gets new records from has values that have a combination of upper and lowercase.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 19738

Answers (3)

Stewart
Stewart

Reputation: 5022

Linux is very case-sensitive.

Windows is sort-of case sensitive. I learned this while looking into this question:

Cannot set %PATH% in windows from boost::process

In cmd.exe you can do this:

SET PATH=%PATH%;C:/MyPath

That will append C:/MyPath to the Path environment variable.

However, if you use Microsoft's SetEnvironmentVariable to set PATH, you'll actually just create a new environment variable called PATH which is independent of the system-variable Path.

Upvotes: 1

barteks2x
barteks2x

Reputation: 1355

In general, the values of environment variables are case-preserving. Whether they are case-sensitive, is likely to depend on operating system and how they are used.

It's the code that uses those environment variables that may, or may not, be case sensitive. So the answer to your question depends on what uses it. Once they are given to code and converted to string type in any particular language, it all depends on how they are used.

Is it used as a file path on windows? Then it's very likely to be case insensitive (unless you do some special changes in windows registry), simply because file paths on windows are case insensitive. Is it for interaction with database? Then ask yourself is the database is case sensitive.

If you are comparing 2 environment variables in shell script (batch, bash or anything else), it's also likely to depend on how exactly it's done. For example IF in a batch script by default is case sensitive, unless given the /I option.

On linux, a good general assumption would be that it's all case sensitive unless specified otherwise.

Upvotes: 7

jannis
jannis

Reputation: 5220

"application that the job gets new records from" has to be changing the strings (provided it's getting the input from the environment). environment variables have nothing to do with case-sensitivity - they contain exactly what you assign to them.

Upvotes: 1

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