On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:02 PM, David Green<david.gr...@telus.net> wrote: > On 2009-Aug-18, at 3:12 am, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: >> >> It may seem cool, but I don't like secondary effects like that. They break >> the principle of least surprise. > > It doesn't seem that surprising to me, especially after seeing the docs the > first time. Are there environments where you can set a variable like $*CWD > and it doesn't do something like chdir?
Yes, and that's normal and expected behaviour. viking...@shell:~$ uname -a Linux shell 2.4.37.5 #1 Sun Aug 16 12:47:03 CEST 2009 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux viking...@shell:~$ bash --version GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i486-slackware-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. viking...@shell:~$ mkdir test viking...@shell:~$ touch test/testfile viking...@shell:~$ cd test viking...@shell:~/test$ ls testfile viking...@shell:~/test$ pwd /home/1/v/vikingmud/test viking...@shell:~/test$ echo $PWD /home/1/v/vikingmud/test viking...@shell:~/test$ PWD="foo/notreallyadirectory" viking...@shell:foo/notreallyadirectory$ ls testfile viking...@shell:foo/notreallyadirectory$ pwd /home/1/v/vikingmud/test viking...@shell:foo/notreallyadirectory$ echo $PWD foo/notreallyadirectory j...@krakas ~ >uname -a Darwin krakas.ELIDED 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 j...@krakas ~ >bash --version GNU bash, version 3.2.17(1)-release (i386-apple-darwin9.0) Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. j...@krakas ~ >mkdir test j...@krakas ~ >touch test/testfile j...@krakas ~ >cd test j...@krakas ~/test >ls testfile j...@krakas ~/test >pwd /Users/jani/test j...@krakas ~/test >echo $PWD /Users/jani/test j...@krakas ~/test >PWD="foo/notreallyadirectory" j...@krakas foo/notreallyadirectory >ls testfile j...@krakas foo/notreallyadirectory >pwd /Users/jani/test j...@krakas foo/notreallyadirectory >echo $PWD foo/notreallyadirectory -- Jan
