The sset program is a front end to set which records your current environment string settings in the file ‘$home/settings.shell’ in a format which is suitable for restoring your environment settings when you log in to the system at a later time. ‘$home/settings.shell’ is normally executed for you when you log onto the system. You should generally use sset rather than set . Environment settings can be substituted anywhere in the command line, regardless of their mode by preceding them with a You can further bind the sub- stitution by parenthesising the name.
For example, Command Output set fred=frog echo $fred frog echo $(fred) frog echo $fred.c frog.c echo /bin/$fred/xx /bin/frog/xx echo aa$fredbb aa$fredbb (sic) echo aa$(fred)bb aafrogbb The environment string named has special meaning for execution path searching. See the xpath command help for details. All these substitutions are performed by the command line interpreter. The file system pathname parsing code also understands environment string substitution, so you can use the $(name) or $name mechanisms wherever you use a normal pathname.
For example if you are within the editor and wish to write a marked block of text out to a file in your home directory you may type ^KW and enter $home/myfile when the editor prompts you for the output filename. The envi- ronment string substitution is done by the operating system, not the editor. The ‘$’ character is mandatory for pathname substitution. Environment strings may be used for communicating information to programs which you run. For example, any program which wishes to know how wide your screen is can look up the ‘screenwidth’ name in your environment.
Note that settings are associated with a shell type process, so if you shell escape from a program such as the editor (command line prompt contains two ‘>’ char- acters) then any new settings you make will be lost after you quit from that shell. If you use sset under these circumstances then the desired setting will be recorded in $home/settings.shell , but another sset from a lower level shell will cause the loss of the new setting. Use sset -l to reload settings from $home/set- tings.shell . Expect some more details of this command when I figure out all the neat uses of it. Page 74 User Tutorial Manual 1616/OS Commands