From: Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@ny.frontiercomm.net>
To: eggink@rrz.uni-hamburg.de (Bernd Eggink)
Cc: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu
Subject: Re: exporting arrays
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 02:18:40 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <199706050618.CAA06697@hzoli.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3395B9DA.58C1C527@rrz.uni-hamburg.de> from Bernd Eggink at "Jun 4, 97 08:54:18 pm"
> "ar" shows up in the list, but in the following 'zsh'-invocation it is
> unset. Is this intentional? I didn't find any restrictions mentioned in
> the manual.
The restriction is in Unix. The contents of an environment variable is
always a plain null-terminated string on Unix. It is possible to hack
something as a workaround, but there is no prefect solution as far as I
know. Neither bash not ksh exports arrays. More precisely ksh93 does
export arrays but only the first array element gets into the enviromnet
(which is consistent since without subscritps a ksh array behaves like a
variable with the first array element as its value).
Exported functions has similar problems (just try foo='() {' bash to
see what I meen). Probably that's why ksh93 does not have exported
functions and POSIX does not require it.
The foo()=... encoding to put functions into the environment seems to be
more reasonable and does not have the problem mentioned above. It was even
included in some early POSIX drafts. I wonder why doesn't bash use that
method instead of this ambiguous foo='() { ...' encoding.
Zoltan
prev parent reply other threads:[~1997-06-05 6:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1997-06-04 18:54 Bernd Eggink
1997-06-05 6:18 ` Zoltan Hidvegi [this message]
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