Re: Problem with an exported array

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> There are hacks which could allow us to represent arrays in it but not
> in a way programs like man could be expected to understand.

That's not entirely true.  A brief and thorougly unscientific
investigation suggests man is doing popen() or something equivalent.
That means that if you set

typeset -ax PAGER
PAGER=(/bin/view -)

and zsh exported PAGER as the string "/bin/view -", it would work
because the shell used to invoked the pager would do the splitting.
(What I actually died was confirm that
  export PAGER="less -e"
did the right thing.)

It shouldn't be too hard to make arrays get exported joined with a
space, or maybe even a configurable string (though the param structure
isn't conveniently extensible at the moment).  I think that's far more
useful than the ksh behaviour --- probably that's just a side effect of
the fact that all variables in ksh are arrays but most just have the first
element set.  However, I haven't looked into it.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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