mly@PREP.AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Mlynarik) (10/08/87)
A recent message claimed that the inability to set environment variables is a reason not to use emacs as a login shell. There is code distributed in Emacs to do this. Change your config.h file to include "#define MAINTAIN_ENVIRONMENT" (obviously, this doesn't work under VMS) MAINTAIN_ENVIRONMENT isn't turned on by default because of RMS' personal preferences. It is, however, available for all of us who feel that it is the `right thing.' The features added are `(getenv t)' (returns alist of all environment variables) and `(setenv var val)' (sets environment variable for current Emacs job and all its inferiors) For hacking the environment passed to an inferior process, the `env' program in emacs/etc/env is often sufficient. For an example of its usage, see emacs/lisp/shell.el