news:e8b6c021.0208100622.8f7ae9e@posting.google.com...

    It's my understanding that you cannot export them to
the parent shell.  Your script creates a subshell (another
copy of  whatever shell you are using) and any variables
die with it.
    Hope I'm wrong. ( I'm a newbie too, and this one has bugged me
thoroughly) but the docs are pretty clear.

Bruce<+>

Yes, that's correct.  If you want to pass information from child process to
parent, you must use some mechanism to do that explicitly, typically a pipe.
Or, as with the cd question, instead of using a script use an alias or
function.

        John
--
John DuBois  spce...@armory.com  KC6QKZ/AE  http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/

news:3d553883$0$79559$8eec23a@newsreader.tycho.net...

    A pipe too....Good.  How about an example for the
3  approaches,  really simple ones?  I'd copy them into
my Bash directory ....

    For instance:  I have a  script that  cds to a directory and allows me
to run less on any file there.But when I  ^c  I find myself in the directory
where I
ran the script from.,  rather than the new one. ( You
explained why on the other thread.)  I'd LIKE to exit
into the one I'm in......You would laugh your head off if
you saw the number of  idiotic attempts I've made to
accomplish this...  Some of them almost crashed my
computer!

Bruce<+>

http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/

Possibility number 1: a subshell (well, any subprocess) can pass data to
its parent by printing it to standard output.

Look at the shell function that ships with mc (Midnight Commander)?

When you run 'mc -P', mc prints out the cwd when you exit it. So, if you
want to use mc to change the working directory of your shell, you could
just define a function:

        mc()
        {
                cd "`mc -P`"
        }

That's it!

Well, to be truthful, the above shell function, although simple and
concise, will behave very badly if you would happen to suspend mc (hit
ctrl-z). To work around the problem, you should save the output of 'mc
-P' into a file. Midnight Commander ships with this sample shell
function that you can use.

        mc ()
        {
                mkdir -p $HOME/.mc/tmp 2> /dev/null
                chmod 700 $HOME/.mc/tmp
                MC=$HOME/.mc/tmp/mc-$$
                /usr/bin/mc -P "$@" > "$MC"
                cd "`cat $MC`"
                /bin/rm -f "$MC"
                unset MC;
        }

The script also takes care of passing other command line arguments
correctly to mc (the use of "$@") and allows you to run multiple mc's at
the same time (the temp file name includes the process id ($$)).

Usually you do not have to take excessive precautions like this and it
is enough to just run the subprocess inside backticks.

    Thank you, Sammi.  Ironically,  I am trying to write
a script for the console that will  act as a simple substitite
for mc and/or the file explorer in vim,  permitting me to
remove mc and vim and use vi.....
    But the key must be in the scripts above, and I will study them
carefully....

Bruce<+>

for csh: soure yourscript
for sh, bash: . yourscript

HTH,
PanTao

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