On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 2:18 AM, Stephane Chazelas <
stephane.chazelas@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2014-11-25 20:54:39 -0800, Kurtis Rader:
> > If by "fake it" you mean cooperative processes that implement a protocol
> > for exchanging environment variables then, yes, you can achieve the
> result
> > desired by Ray. However I think that everyone trying to achieve this
> result
> > wants to do so without having to implement a new data exchange protocol
> in
> > every program.
> [...]
>
> FYI, the "fish" shell does that.
>
> set -U universal its value
>
> and that $universal variable (here an array) becomes available
> in all the fish shells (interactive or not) by the same user on
> the machine (with all the security implications it entails).
>
>
Note that fish implements this in a manner similar to one mentioned earlier
in this thread: it uses a separate process that acts as a variable server.
When fish tries to look up a variable, and fails to find it in either the
local or global scope, it contacts the server to see if the variable exists
at the "universal" scope.