On Sun, 18 Nov 2012 10:35:14 -0800
Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 17, 4:39pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
}
} Is there a way to instantly share environment variables between running
} terminals?
Generally speaking, no. The environment of each process is private to
that process, allocated by the operating system at the time the process
is forked.
If desperate enough, you could set up something using the zsh/tcp module
to have your shells cooperatively swap new environment strings around.
One shell (or an external daeamon of some kind -- condsider the model
used by ssh-agent) would have to control the "master" environment, and
hand out changes to the other shells on request. The other shells would
check at opportune times (during precmd for example) whether changes are
available, and apply them.
It might be easier to intercept typeset etc. and turn them into shell
functions that save the environment. You'd probably need to do some
fairly nifty history-style timestamping to ensure you didn't simply
reimport the entire environment each time, however --- particularly to
ensure you got the latest results over all shells.
Hmm, I wonder if doing something clever examining the actual saved
history (with INC_APPEND_HISTORY set) would help?