Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: Re: find-grep makes raw terminal ANSI]

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
>> Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:28:25 -0800
>> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> > !     (setenv "TERM" "emacs")
>> 
>> I apologize if this reply is not very meaningful, as I haven't followed
>> this.
>> 
>> But is it good to change a user's environment variable this way?
>
> setenv doesn't change user's environment, it changes the environment
> passed to inferior processes.

My first reaction to this was "Huh?".  In UNIX, where the environment
concept originated, it is _exclusively_ something which is passed to
inferior processes, quite like command line arguments.

It is only when coming from an MSDOS background (which tended to
implement UNIX concepts badly or incompletely, and so had something like
a global environment, and pipes implemented with intermediate files of
arbitrary size and other things close, but not identical to the real
thing) that something like a global "user's environment" concept does
even exist.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum