Hi,

Have you ever used shell level, $SHLVL, in your weekly ~> daily use of Unix?

I had largely dismissed it until a recent conversation in a newsgroup. 
I learned that shelling out of programs also increments the shell level. 
  I.e. :shell or :!/bin/sh in vim.

Someone also mentioned quickly starting a new sub-shell from the current 
shell for quick transient tasks, i.e. dc / bc, mount / cp / unmount, 
{,r,s}cp, etc., in an existing terminal window to avoid cluttering that 
first terminals history with the transient commands.

That got me to wondering if there were other uses for shell level 
($SHLVL).  Hence my question.

This is more about using (contemporary) shells on Unix, than it is about 
Unix history.  But I suspect that TUHS is one of the best places to find 
the most people that are likely to know about shell level.  Feel free to 
reply to COFF if it would be better there.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die