Yeah, and environment variables as well. It's notable that the syntax for reading an environment variable in bash is identical to the syntax for reading a "norm

Yeah, and environment variables as well. It's notable that the syntax for reading an environment variable in bash is identical to the syntax for reading a "normal", process local variable (though setting is slightly different, you have to use "export"). It's like the ground scope is "the computing environment" (files, processes, env vars, ...), not the "program sandbox".