On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 06:52:32PM -0500, J. Milgram wrote: > Is it possible for a child process to set an environment variable in the > parent process that launched it?
Nope, at least not through any of the standard programmatic interfaces that the OS provides. If you want to get Extremely Tricky I suppose you could reach into the parent process's memory space (via /proc or similar) and scribble new environment information into it...but this would be risky and highly non-portable. If the goal is to pass info from the child process to the parent, it's probably much simpler/cleaner to just have them talk over a pipe. If the child and the parent are written in something that makes setting up a pipe difficult, then the expedient of having the parent read a file written by child -- which I know is clunky -- might get the job done.
