Re: sharing environment between terminals.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 18/11/12 11:33 AM, Peter Stephenson wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Nov 2012 10:35:14 -0800
> Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 17,  4:39pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
>> }
>> } Is there a way to instantly share environment variables between running
>> } terminals?
>>
>> Generally speaking, no.  The environment of each process is private to
>> that process, allocated by the operating system at the time the process
>> is forked.
>>
>> If desperate enough, you could set up something using the zsh/tcp module
>> to have your shells cooperatively swap new environment strings around.
>> One shell (or an external daeamon of some kind -- condsider the model
>> used by ssh-agent) would have to control the "master" environment, and
>> hand out changes to the other shells on request.  The other shells would
>> check at opportune times (during precmd for example) whether changes are
>> available, and apply them.
> It might be easier to intercept typeset etc. and turn them into shell
> functions that save the environment.  You'd probably need to do some
> fairly nifty history-style timestamping to ensure you didn't simply
> reimport the entire environment each time, however --- particularly to
> ensure you got the latest results over all shells.
>
> Hmm, I wonder if doing something clever examining the actual saved
> history (with INC_APPEND_HISTORY set) would help?
>
Peter,

For now, I'm not going to get out of my depth with things. My nastly 
little hack does what I need it to do, so I'm going to rest with that 
for now unless there is a 'lite' fix that I can understand.