On Tuesday, December 02, 2003, at 09:34AM, Tom Edelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Regarding this statement from PERLDOC PERLVMS:
>
> The element "$ENV{DEFAULT}" is special: when read, it returns
> Perl's current default device and directory, and when set, it
> resets them, regardless of the definition of PERL_ENV_TABLES. It
> cannot be cleared or deleted; attempts to do so are silently
> ignored.
>
>In 5.6.1, at least, it looks like the act of evaluating "keys(%ENV)"
>makes this no longer true:
I can confirm this in a recent development patchlevel as well. It looks like the keys
function causes the invocation of prime_env_iter() in vms.c, which spawns a process to
do SHOW LOGICAL * and parses through the output. It provides no special treatment for
the 'DEFAULT' key the way the other environment lookup functions do (those that deal
with an individual key), so it loads the equivalence name as the hash value.
It's not immediately clear to me whether we should simply skip loading DEFAULT at this
step or if we should load the value of the current working directory. I'm concerned
that if we do the latter, that value may be cached and will not get updated if the
directory changes. As a workaround, you can simply do delete($ENV{DEFAULT}) to get
back the special behavior.
