Autzoo.997 net.v7bugs utzoo!henry Thu Oct 1 19:16:21 1981 shell misfeature The following does not always do what you expect: PATH=/bin:/usr/bin ... something ... Why? Because except in some situations where all programs involved are shell files, the offspring will see the original PATH, not "/bin:/usr/bin". Why so? Because the change to PATH was not exported! Of the people here who have run into this "feature", 100% think that it is both (a) counterintuitive and (b) wrong. The rule that "no change is exported unless the variable is exported" is elegant but is bad human engineering, because the "exported" status of the variable is not passed down to children when the value is passed down. Even the shell doesn't consistently follow this rule, witness the "except" in the first sentence above. Proposal: variables inherited from the environment should be implicitly and automatically marked "exported". Does anybody see anything wrong/bad about this? For an example of the trouble, the "PATH=/bin:/usr/bin;" that uuxqt prepends to every command it runs is not inherited by the command. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.