[Fri Feb 7 17:06:46 CST 2014]

While working on a scripting project at work using the Bash shell, I ran into an interesting issue that I hadn't noticed before. As it turns out, it's a bad idea to use dashes in the names of variables when doing shell scripting. Notice this:

$ cat myscript 
#!/bin/bash

DATE-NOW=`date`
echo $DATE-NOW

$ ./myscript 
./myscript: line 3: DATE-NOW=Fri: command not found
-NOW

$ cat myscript 
#!/bin/bash

DATE_NOW=`date`
echo $DATE_NOW

$ ./myscript 
Fri Feb 7 17:11:18 CST 2014

[Fri Feb 7 11:36:17 CST 2014]

Today, while viewing posts by other people on Google Plus, I came across the following nice graph that shows the timeline of the Debian project. It's a bit outdated and it contains a small error (the codename for Debian 7.0 is "Wheezy", and not "Wheeze"), but it's quite nice anyways: