On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 07:15:07PM +1000, Andy Eager wrote: > Hi all, > > Got a bit of a C code using execle() to call a shell script with a > specific environment. I've got no trouble seeing the environment vars > in bash. > > Is there any way of setting an environment variable in the shell script > so that it modifies the environment of the *parent* process? > I fear not - but is there any way of returning something from a shell > other than through an exit status?
My C is a bit rusty, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall correctly... You fear correctly -- a child can't modify its parent's environment. There are other ways to communicate between processes, though. One option that springs to mind is to open a pipe(2) in the parent before you fork and exec, then the child could write to the pipe, and the parent could read from it. If you create a pair of pipes, and in the child (before forking) use e.g. dup2(2) to copy their file descriptors to 0 and 1, then you've just created a stdin and a stdout for the child to use, then you should just be able to use 'echo' and so on in your shell script without any problems. :) You probably should create a third pipe for stderr, too -- although you could probably get away with re-using the stdout pipe. -Andrew. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug