On Aug 27, 2006, at 2:32 PM, Mark E. Perkins wrote:
> Those are (b)make variables, not shell variables. Shell variable  
> names must be
> constructed from letters, digits, underscores, and begin with a  
> letter or
> underscore. This is spelled out in the man pages for bash and tcsh,  
> although
> not particularly easy to find (search for 'underscore' and read the
> surrounding bits of text).

Thank you and to everyone else who has replied, this explains it  
all... I had
misunderstood the nature of those variables, driven by the fact that on
NetBSD I could set them via the plain setenv command... I'll use
mk.conf from now on... it's cleaner, too :)

david
www.redmist.altervista.org/blog