Setting variables for a running process

Ron Natalie ron at brl
Wed May 22 07:43:26 AEST 1985


No, it's not possible to change environment variables from "lower forks"
because each process gets it's own copy of the environment.  Changing
the environment of one process does not affect any others.  Same story
for things like the current directory.  Forks get an identical environment
because fork just copies process.  The exec call to the kernel tells it
exactly what you want to environment of the execed process to be.

The three things I do are:

	TERM=`process`

Set TERM using what is the output process and the temporary environment
setting such as

	TERM=vt52 vi

If send used the shell to execute the editor, this would work, but alas
it uses pexec or something else instead.  I've refered the problem to the
send maintainers here.

-Ron



More information about the Comp.unix mailing list