How to display variables without case sensitivity

This is the second of many shell (bash) tips that I'll be posting here. This little script will allow you to display the value of variables without having case sensitiveness or having to enter the “$” before the variable name.

Here's what displaying a variable without the script looks like:

$ echo $PATH /home/victor/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

And here after the script:

$ var path /home/victor/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games $ var PATH /home/victor/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

You can see that both ways will work (as long as the variable does not have the same name in lower and capital case).

And here's the script, which can also be added to ~/.bashrc

var () { _var="$1"; if [ -n "${!_var}" ]; then echo ${!_var}; else _var=$(echo "$_var" | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z'); echo ${!_var}; fi }