There is no such thing as a spec for setting “regular” environment variables. Well there is but that’s a much deeper concept in Linux, than what most people ge

There is no such thing as a spec for setting “regular” environment variables. Well there is but that’s a much deeper concept in Linux, than what most people get exposed to, in the execve family of functions, where it is defined in C as an array of strings with the key separated from value only by =. Unless you refer to how to do it in shell. That wouldn’t be applicable to a configuration language. Shell has a lot richer syntax and more complex logic, allowing variable templating and even running processes inside a string definition using $(). All the quoting rules around that must be different.