Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: command line options
Message-ID: <7746@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 24 Apr 88 16:16:40 GMT
References: <2414@zyx.UUCP> <8039@elsie.UUCP> <7628@brl-smoke.ARPA> <143@gsg.UUCP> <7634@brl-smoke.ARPA> <1864@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <1864@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Speaking of the bourne-again shell (System V shell), how do you get a shell
>function inherited by subshells?

In the 8th Edition UNIX shell, you simply export them via the environment.
In the BRL SVR2 Bourne shell, you define the functions in the per-
interactive-shell startup file named in the ENV environment variable
(the usual usage around here is to define ENV as ~/.env and have ~/.env
source a ~/.funcs file that contains the definitions).  Note that this
scheme prevents having functions screw up shell scripts (which are not
run as "interactive").
In a vanilla UNIX System V Bourne shell, you cannot obtain the desired
effect so far as I am aware.