Customization and Subprocesses

Some of the variables discussed above are used by commands you may run—as opposed to the shell itself—so that they can determine certain aspects of your environment. The majority, however, are not even known outside the shell.

This dichotomy begs an important question: which shell "things" are known outside the shell, and which are only internal? This question is at the heart of many misunderstandings about the shell and shell programming. Before we answer, we'll ask it again in a more precise way: which shell "things" are known to subprocesses? Remember that whenever you enter a command, you are telling the shell to run that command in a subprocess; furthermore, some complex programs may start their own subprocesses.

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Now for the answer, which (like many UNIX concepts) is unfortunately not as simple as you might like. A few things are known to subprocesses, but the reverse is not true: subprocesses can never make these things known to the processes that created them.

Which things are known depends on whether the subprocess in question is a bash program (see Chapter 4) or an interactive shell. If the subprocess is a bash program, then it's possible to propagate nearly every type of thing we've seen in this chapter—options and variables—plus a few we'll see later.