Re:Little Things That Made Amiga Great
by sime2009 on Sunday November 29, 2020 @12:52PM
(#25246672)
Yes, a lot like a union mount except that it was read only and easy to modify.
Assigns were often used for things that we today would stuff into an environment variable to represent an array of paths. Instead of an environment variable for setting the search path for shared libraries, on the Amiga you would just setup `LIBS:` and an application could find its libraries by opening `LIBS:MyFoo.library`. Similar story for $PATH. Amiga has `PATH:` which "contained" all of the executables in your path. Unlike unix style environment variables, assigns were system wide. (Amiga was a single user system.)
Assigns were often used for things that we today would stuff into an environment variable to represent an array of paths. Instead of an environment variable for setting the search path for shared libraries, on the Amiga you would just setup `LIBS:` and an application could find its libraries by opening `LIBS:MyFoo.library`. Similar story for $PATH. Amiga has `PATH:` which "contained" all of the executables in your path. Unlike unix style environment variables, assigns were system wide. (Amiga was a single user system.)