Post AX5v6wuFdHELTat0r2 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
 (DIR) More posts by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
 (DIR) Post #AWTXp9aIQxJ6vIzy40 by SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange
       2023-06-08T03:18:39Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110725-00/?p=10073
       
 (DIR) Post #AX5v6wuFdHELTat0r2 by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
       2023-06-08T03:50:07Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @SwiftOnSecurity Some history:PATH search started via PWB/UNIX shell in 1975, was just $p (we only had single-character variables, pathanmes separated by colons).A few years later, for UNIX V7, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Bourne and I generalized PWB design into environment variables, and p became PATH. Of course, semantics somewhat different than Windows, since UNIX didn't have registry and environment variables were inherited by child processes as hidden arguments.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB_shell
       
 (DIR) Post #AX5v6xudtJ8ab64q6S by SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange
       2023-06-08T18:10:06Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @JohnMashey wow cool! Thank you for the insight!
       
 (DIR) Post #AX5v6ymsdeWTJJS9dw by JohnMashey@mstdn.social
       2023-06-08T19:58:21Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       @SwiftOnSecurity When Steve, Dennis and I were talking about environment variables, we considered having a kernel-internal database per process tree ... but UNIX philosophy=>only put data in kernel that had to be there, especially given awkward 64KB kernel data space limit at any one time.If env vars were just in a shared file=>slow, & also worry about dangerof misusing env vars for interprocess communcations, with race conditions.Anyway, dennis suggested the mechanism that still is there.