Re: name of a global variable to store the result of a function

[Peng Yu]

> That said, my personal preference is still to use an agreed-upon variable
> name to "return" the function's output value, such as "r" or "_r".  This
> avoids all of the need to validate variable names, to triple-check an eval
> usage, etc.  As long as you're not dealing with recursive functions, this
> works quite well, in my experience.


That’s what I think too. Use eval and perform a sanity check is an overkill
for this purpose. But it is surprising that there is no well accepted
convention given bash already have similar variables like BASH_REMATCH to
hold results of a previous command.
-- 
Regards,
Peng