upper working on one system but not in another

[MAD_2]

I came up into a very irritating situation in which a portion of a script is working in one system but not working in another. Here is the segment in question:

============================================================
BRANCH=NONE

while echo "Enter branch #, or command, or help (Current branch = $BRANCH): \c"
read COMMAND
do
COMMAND=`upper \"$COMMAND\"`

case $COMMAND in
### change branch

[F,P,M,T,A,C,S,Z,R]*) FIELD=`echo $COMMAND | awk '{print $1}'`
VALUE=`echo $COMMAND | awk '{print $2}'`

if [ "$HAVEBRANCH" = "Y" ]
then PARMFILE=bmaint.$$

echo "$BRANCH|$COMMAND" > /tmp/$PARMFILE
echo "\n"

sqlplus -s $IMALOGIN @branch_upd.pl $PARMFILE
echo "\n" sqlplus -s $IMALOGIN @bchlist.pl $BRANCH

echo "\n"
else
echo "\nBranch must be specified!\n"
fi;;

HELP) cat branch_maint.hlp;;

============================================================


The code is the same in two machines, one is an RP5470 and the other is an HP9000, both have 64 bit HP-UX 11.00. However, the piece of code with "upper" only works on the RP5470 and it's not working on the HP9000. Why?

I have managed to resolve the problem by substituing the portion:

COMMAND=`upper \"$COMMAND\"`

With:

typeset -u COMMAND

This above the "read COMMAND". However, I am still puzzled why it works on one but not the other.

Please, any clues are appreciated.

[MAD_2]

Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that I kept testing this only with the "HELP" portion of the case control structure. I was typing lower case "help"+CR and the system would just hang, nothing would happen. It would not execute the cat of the help text file.

But this was working on the other system.

[MAD_2]

Oh, no sweat. I found where the problem was happening.

This upper was an internal utility which converts lower to upper case by use of PL/SQL code and was not well documented. The login required for the PL/SLQ code to execute was not changed in the system in question and that is why it was failing.

Thanks!