Reports

folks .. thanks for you input .. your suggestions plus a brutal afternoon of trial and many many errors led me to an answer in two parts:

pathToUpper() { printf '%s' ${1:-path} | tr [:lower:] [:upper:] ; }
pathlist() { local -n tmp=`pathToUpper $1`; echo $tmp | tr : \\n; }

# and then come the aliases
alias path='pathlist path'

alias llpath='pathlist ld_library_path'
alias libpath=llpath
alias pathlib=llpath
alias manpath='pathlist manpath'

i wanted to be able to type "path" to get $PATH listed out, one file path per line. I also wanted to be able to do the same for $MANPATH .. and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH .. etc .. you get the idea.

as i was denting the wall next to my desk i got tired of having to use caps lock to test the different path names so i conceived the idea of forcing the input to uppercase .. as all good env vars are in All Caps, right?

there does not seem to be a way to force upper case in a shell variable expansion; ${var,,} will change the contents of $var to lower case .. upper is perhaps possible but is more work to figure out. Laziness sets in when the Ibuprofen wears off.

And one cannot combine the lower case conversion with a default : ${1:-path,,} and ${${1:-path},,} fail to win bash shell favour .. but i found a way to combine default assignment with the need to evaluate the env var to get a colon ":" separated list of paths .. thus the pathToUpper function up there.

I do not need a general purpose toUpper function so i did not bother to factor one out .. so having a lower case "path" as a default works in this solution.

Then it was just playing with ways to append the resulting upper case env var name to a '$' and get the result evaluated into the needed list. That is what the pathlist function is doing in these steps:

evaluate the input to have an uppercase path name
echo that to get it expanded
pipe the list of folder names to the tr command that converts the despised colons into the friendly, and more useful newline characters.

and Bob's your uncle .. at least, he might be. He certainly is not mine. But i have my solution

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