On Mon, 21 May 2001, Bob Miller wrote: <snip> > Now, login is a setuid program, and it runs in a process just like > everything else (except the kernel). So login builds a complete new > environment for your login shell. So if you set something in a > startup script, that something won't be inherited by users, but > it will be . > Alice noticed that the room was getting smaller, or she was getting larger... > > More accurately, it sets the variable for that process and for all > future descendants of that process. If you export a variable > from a script, it only affects that script, not the login shell > that invoked the script. > Aha! this may explain things > > (*) I'm glossing over the fact that starting a new process isn't quite > the same as executing a new program. For this discussion, I think > we can ignore the distinction. For more info, though, see the > fork(2) and execve(2) man pages. coolness , thank you Kbob Yeah, this makes much clear to me that i only half_understood i guess i've been spending too much time in python land, all those nice clean library modules making it so that things just worked ;-)
