Question

Is it good shell programming practice to use read-only variables whenever possible or does it have any drawbacks? E.g. if I wanted to write some script that consists of multiple script files that make use of immutable file paths, would it make sense to declare the paths like that:

readonly LOGS
export LOGS 
LOGS="/some/path"

Another question: Is it a good idea to split monolithic and tedious too read shell script code into separate files?
Many thanks for your answers.

Answer 1

It sounds like you might think that readonly does more than it really does. For one thing, readonly status is not exported into the environment or inherited by child processes:

$ declare -rx LOGS=hello
$ LOGS=goodbye
bash: LOGS: readonly variable
$ bash -c 'echo "$LOGS"'
hello
$ bash -c 'LOGS=goodbye; echo "$LOGS"'
goodbye
$