Correct Bash and shell script variable capitalization

Question

I run across many shell scripts with variables in all caps, and I\'ve always thought that there is a severe misunderstanding with that. My understanding is that, by convent

Answer 1

By convention, environment variables (PAGER, EDITOR, ...) and internal shell variables (SHELL, BASH_VERSION, ...) are capitalized. All other variable names should be lower case.

Remember that variable names are case-sensitive; this convention avoids accidentally overriding environmental and internal variables.

Keeping to this convention, you can rest assured that you don't need to know every environment variable used by UNIX tools or shells in order to avoid overwriting them. If it's your variable, lowercase it. If you export it, uppercase it.