On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 01:37:57PM -0600, Bill Gradwohl wrote: > When the child creates a global to pass back information, and then > terminates, the parent had no control over that variables creation and is > now stuck with something in the global name space that via the hierarchy of > calls, it doesn't properly own. I would never purposely write code that did > that, and was surprised that bash allows it.
All variables are global by default. Local variables are a special bash feature. POSIX shells don't even necessarily *have* the capability of making local variables. Remember, bash is a shell. It also has a few features that you'd expect in a programming language, but it is first and foremost a command interpreter.
