process id's in a world of cooperating subshells

Hi, As far as I am able to tell, there is no well-known way to ascertain the current pid of a subshell. You can write programs that return their parent's pid, but that is pretty hacky. So, I dug through some sketchy docs and examples about rolling your own built in BASH commands and came up wit

`read -a': spurious ctrl char when unescaping

Configuration Information [Automatically generated, do not change]: Machine: i486 OS: linux-gnu Compiler: gcc Compilation CFLAGS: -DPROGRAM='bash' -DCONF_HOSTTYPE='i486' -DCONF_OSTYPE='linux-gnu' -DCONF_MACHTYPE='i486-pc-linux-gnu' -DCONF_VENDOR='pc' -DLOCALEDIR='/usr/share/locale' -DPACKAGE='ba