It might sound strange at first but i 
must say that it's very useful 
specially if you have shell scripts as part of your application. Usually
 For making this scripts as automated as possible there should be a way 
to
 reuse the application's configurations (ips, passwords , etc) and not 
having to update a separate configuration file whenever anything changes
 in the application. It's not limited only to this and can be used to 
pass any kind of variables.