How sensible is ... ?

[Phil Pennock <comet@xxxxxxxx>]

How good an idea would it be to add a shell-callable context builtin, or
a shell variable, to tell whether something is being run directly or as
a function call?  (I could be displaying ignorance of something that's
already there, I suppose)

Eg, have a directory of zsh scripts, which start:
#!/bin/zsh -f
case $context in
 toplevel) alias leave=exit ;;
 function) alias leave=return ;;
esac

the scripts could then be written such that zsh users could autoload
them and others could run them and get the same effective results.

These would of course be tricky, but I feel potentially more useful for
system administrators who want to provide a bunch of small fast
utilities for ALL users.

I don't particularly want to have to litter a directory with 5-line
scripts which always require fork-exec, I'd rather have a special
directory containing files as per above and have the relevant system
initialisation scripts sort out which PATH/FPATH it should go in.

Feedback welcome
-- 
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