Re: Problem with an exported array

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> There are hacks which could allow us to represent arrays in it but not
> in a way programs like man could be expected to understand.

That's not entirely true.  A brief and thorougly unscientific
investigation suggests man is doing popen() or something equivalent.
That means that if you set

typeset -ax PAGER
PAGER=(/bin/view -)

and zsh exported PAGER as the string "/bin/view -", it would work
because the shell used to invoked the pager would do the splitting.
(What I actually died was confirm that
  export PAGER="less -e"
did the right thing.)

It shouldn't be too hard to make arrays get exported joined with a
space, or maybe even a configurable string (though the param structure
isn't conveniently extensible at the moment).  I think that's far more
useful than the ksh behaviour --- probably that's just a side effect of
the fact that all variables in ksh are arrays but most just have the first
element set.  However, I haven't looked into it.

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


**********************************************************************
The information transmitted is intended only for the person or
entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential 
and/or privileged material. 
Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or
taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by 
persons or entities other than the intended recipient is 
prohibited.  
If you received this in error, please contact the sender and 
delete the material from any computer.
**********************************************************************