what does export do?

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, May 21, 2005 1:08 AM +0300 Markku Kolkka <markkuk at tuubi.net> 
wrote:

> in Windows a new process gets a copy of the globally set system and user
> environment variables.

That's not my experience. I routinely spawn processes from my editor (an 
Emacs clone) and those processes get their environment from the editor, not 
from its parent, the Windows desktop shell. The environment seen in the 
System object is just what the desktop process loads when it starts. The 
desktop process is similar to the init process in Linux, the ancestor of 
all processes.