Re: saved from prince of eval

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 10,  5:07pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
}
} It's seems strange tho, how can a parameter be 
} set twice (or 16 times) to exactly the same value?

Obviously it can't.  You're either accidentally appending to something,
or setting the value of a new key in an associative array.

} Speaking of which, we have 'env' which only gives us the--don't know the 
} proper term--lowest level system stuff.

It's called "env" for "environment" -- it shows you the stuff that has
been "export"ed (or that was already in the environment before the
shell started).

} And we have 'set' which gives us 
} everything including the kitchen sink.

You probably want "typeset -p" followed by a list of the parameter
names you actually care about seeing.

} the output refuses to open in any of my editors if piped to a file, they 
} all think it's binary.

Probably because $IFS includes a NUL (zero) byte and bracketed_paste
contains a couple of ESC characters.

} Looking at it in hex, I see that it's a soup of 
} backslashes and single quotes. Why is that?

Because it's being output in the format that the shell would have to
parse in order to read it back in again.  However, the backslashes
are probably of your own making, from your attempts to use (e).  I've
got exactly two parameters that output with a backslash in the value:
SPROMPT and WORDCHARS.