Re:How Unix made it to the top
by jbuzbee on Sunday December 18, 2016 @08:51AM
(#13205804)
It's been a long time since I've used VMS, but one neat feature I recall was sort of a system/group/user concept of environment variables. For example if you set an environment variable at the system level, the new value would immediately be reflected for all users. Powerful concept.
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You are thinking of VMS logicals. Of course they can be used for more than just environment variables! They can also be used to provide an extra level of indirection to filenames. Neat stuff!
I forgot about that. Was an interesting concept. Question, how can one tell if a UN*X newbee came from VMS ? You get a question from them "How to I change an environment variable for the parent process ?" :) That was allowed in VMS but forgot which type of VMS variable that was.