(No) Exported Functions

(No) Exported Functions

[Suresh.Kannan]

Hi,

I've read the manuals and googled and as far as I can see, zsh doesn't appear to support exported functions. Is this true? If not please ignore the rest of the mail :)

Also, going through some old discussions, it appears that some people feel that the feature itself is of dubious value. However, I find it a shortcoming in the following situations:

1. In my environment are weird and wonderful functions that do some useful stuff on a list of files, let's say coolfun()

I can't do a 
$ find . -name '*.blah' | xargs coolfun # coolfun: No such file or directory

2. I can't invoke 
:!coolfun % 
from vim, my favourite editor.

Both shortcomings are somewhat rectified by arranging to have coolfun's definition in $HOME/.zshenv. However, this gets tedious (and possibly inefficient) when a large number of functions are involved. I tried doing a
$ functions >> ~/.zshenv
in my .zshrc as a shortcut but this puts all the autoloaded functions into the env file causing error messages when completion is first attempted etc. like:
$ cd sss<tab>
_next_label:comptags:8: no tags registered

Does anyone have a better solution / workaround to this problem. Or is exported functions somewhere in the feature-list ?

Thanks,
Suresh

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Re: (No) Exported Functions

[Peter Stephenson]

Suresh.Kannan@ubs.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've read the manuals and googled and as far as I can see, zsh doesn't
> appear to support exported functions. Is this true?

That's correct.

The right way to do this is:

1. Create a directory with your functions in them, each with the same name as
   the function.  Call this ~/zsh_functions, for example.  (The standard
   zsh format is for only the body of the function to be in the file,
   but if it's all surrounded by funcname() { ... } it will still work.)

2. In your ~/.zshenv, add

   fpath=(~/zsh_functions $fpath)
   autoload ~/zsh_functions/*(:t)

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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Re: (No) Exported Functions

[Thomas Köhler]

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Hi,

Suresh.Kannan@ubs.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've read the manuals and googled and as far as I can see, zsh
> doesn't appear to support exported functions. Is this true? If
> not please ignore the rest of the mail :)

Apart from Peter's answer which explains all of that "exported
function" stuff, I'd like to add something...

> 1. In my environment are weird and wonderful functions that do
> some useful stuff on a list of files, let's say coolfun()
> 
> I can't do a 
> $ find . -name '*.blah' | xargs coolfun # coolfun: No such file or directory

But with "setopt extendedglob" you can do a
$ coolfun **/*.blah
which is shorter anyways :)

> Thanks,
> Suresh

Ciao,
Thomas

-- 
 Thomas Köhler       Email:       jean-luc@picard.franken.de
     <><             WWW:           http://jeanluc-picard.de
                     IRC:                           tkoehler
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