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From: arisawa@ar.aichi-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: [9fans] Environment variable
Date: Wed,  9 Aug 2006 20:16:34 +0900
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
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Thanks Martin,

Then, how to bring up an environment variable a to a shell variable b?
command
b=`{cat /env/a}
does not work all the time.

On 2006/08/09, at 20:03, Martin Neubauer wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I don't think that this really is weird. My understanding is that
> the terminating '\0' is not treated as part of the content of a
> string but merely of its representation in memory. So if you output
> a null string, you don't actually output anything (and therefore
> assign nothing to $b). That then explains why xd fails to open $a
> (which is an actual string, albeit with length zero) and waits for
> standard input because $b isn't expanded to anything.
>
> I hope my attempt at an explanation wasn't utter nonsense and helped
> clarifying a bit.
>
> Regards,
>    Martin