On 2023-01-22 08:15, Bart Schaefer wrote:
This is exactly what I suggested in zsh-users/28317 last November, except I wrote it as a one-liner using the $parameters variable.
It can take a while for things to sink in. One has to be ready. There are times when some question or some mistake of mine leads to a tsunami of fixes, cascading mental adjustments -- mistakes within mistakes, new ideas, re-thinks -- a whole lot of dominos fall over and I can't stand them all back up again in one go.
The operating system defines the environment as an array ("C"
language) of strings; you can't nest the arrays. The way an array is
represented in the environment is by convention to separate the
elements with colons.
I just love these deep insights. So this drills right down to a C limitation! Or should I say an OS limitation? C would permit a structure even if Linux won't countenance it. Mind, it's the sort of thing that's so deep in the bedrock that a change is hardly possible. Your answer cures me of any whinyness -- not zsh's issue. Death and taxes and no arrays in the environment, get used to it. But now I finally get the point of those colons, it seemed dumb -- PATH is 'naturally' an array. So we have $path :-) And I can confidently extrapolate that path is created from PATH, not visa versa, yes? (Cuz a given shell can only 'inherit' PATH, thus the friendlier path must be the derivative.)