Re: CDPATH reports to stdout and even non-interactively

[Matthew Woehlke]

Geoff Kuenning wrote:
> I don't mean that the shell should ignore ALL environment variables;
> that would break a ton of scripts.  Even ignoring PATH would be a Very
> Bad Thing, since we've long ago grown used to inheriting PATH.

Ignoring PATH would make life much, MUCH harder. I just finished writing 
a script that relies on PATH being set a particular way; in fact, I even 
check that it is and refuse to run otherwise. (Ok, I guess I could set 
the path myself, but it's for a development environment, and making the 
user do it means less chance for them to shoot themselves in the foot 
later because PATH is set wrong. Oh, and if ALL environment variables 
were ignored, I wouldn't even be able to fix PATH, because I need a 
different environment variable to know where the source tarball got 
unpacked... or else, the script would have to instead make assumptions 
about the current directory. So, ah, yeah, ignoring PATH would IMO be 
bad, ignoring /everything/ would cause me to find another shell that's 
less fatally brain-dead ;-).) And I know I have umpteen scripts floating 
around that are intended to run in a particular environment and will 
break otherwise. So... yeah, let's not go there ;-). (I wouldn't be 
surprised if CDPATH is the same way, to be honest, i.e. I wouldn't be 
surprised if there are scripts that require it to be set a particular way.)

>     BASH_ENV

Hmm, I know I rely on that, but maybe for starting new bash instances 
(i.e. set from script and rely on the new shell to inherit it). But I 
guess that's sort-of the whole point of the variable in the first place, 
so...

>     HOME

Again, if bash were to start ignoring HOME, I'm fairly sure that would 
break a bunch of my scripts. (Yeah. I have a particular environment in 
which I abuse HOME, setting it to something other than my home 
directory, but...)

>     PATH

See above ;-), but I guess you were already convinced that mucking with 
this would be a problem, so that's good :-).

--
Matthew
In the beginning, there were not enough colors. -- Guy Keren