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	id 12zZit-000170-00; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 08:53:55 +0200
To:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: environment again
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From:	Carlo Strozzi <carlos@linux.it>
Date:	Wed, 7 Jun 2000 02:53:55 -0400

Hi all,

a few weeks back I started a thread on the fact that rc should provide
a way of not exporting variables to the environment. There seemed to
be a general position that the current behaviour is ok. I think it
isn't, though:

; ls -l bigfile
-rw-r--r--   1 carlos   carlos     660226 May  8 14:13 bigfile

; a=`{cat bigfile}

; echo $a |wc -c
wc: Argument list too long

Any command after that fails with the same message, presumably because
of the bloated environment.

That was tested on AIX and Linux. I have tested it also with
a=``(){cat bigfile}, if that matters.

Doing the same with ksh:

$ a="`cat bigfile`"

echo "$a" | wc -c
 660226
$

So no problem, so far. Then:

$ export a

$ /bin/echo x
ksh: /bin/echo: Argument list too long

Again, a bloated environment does give problems, but the fact that ksh
does not export things by default is a plus here. "Well, why don't you
just use ksh then?" some of you may say. Because I rather like the
philosophy behind rc, I just would like it not to have those very few
defects. If I were a C programmer I would try to fix it myself, but
even so I would need to convince the rc people if I wanted to have
those changes included into the mainstram code.

As a final note, making rc swallow a large file all in one go would not
be necessary if it had a 'read' function, for line-oriented input, which
was the other thread of mine on this list.

	--carlo