processing passwords?

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Jay Ashworth propounded (on Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 05:09:59PM -0400):
| ----- Original Message -----
| > From: "Jean-Pierre A. Radley" <appl at jpr.com>
| 
| > | KENMAGIC=1; export KENMAGIC
| > 
| > Why the superflous, unnecessary semi-colon?
| 
| export means "make the named variable visible to child processes; 
| doing an assignment in front of a command makes it visible to *that*
| processes, but *not* in the environment of the shell running that 
| process; I've never been clear on the semantics of the first.  So since
| I *always* want it set in the current process as well as its children,
| I do the assignment and the export as separate commands.

An assignment exists in the environment of the shell in which it is
made.
An assignment preceding a command makes it exist in the command's
environment too.
Since the command in this case an "export" of that assignment, the
assignment persists in the environment of the shell in which it was
made as well as in all of that shell's children.

-- 
JP