henry (05/30/82)
I now realize why setting PATH but not exporting it didn't work. There is a shell bug in that some aspects of behavior are different depending on whether you are executing a shell file or a program, because things like the "exported" status of a shell variable are inherited in shell files (because the shell just forks and the daughter shell does not reinitialize itself properly). Hence news inherits the export status of PATH in the user's main shell, which is "exported" for obvious reasons, and changes news makes to PATH *do* get exported.