Re: IDL and UNIX setenv

[Randall Skelton <rhskelto(at)atm.ox.ac.uk>]

> I think you might need to add the path to your default .profile/.login/.cshrc/.whatever
> (which I am assuming you're not doing - I really can't tell from "I tried to append the
> /usr1/guest/bin/ directory to my UNIX path before starting an IDL session")
> 
> I *think* when you use SPAWN, the subsequent shell in which the SPAWN command argument is
> executed is *not* the one you started IDL in and therefore has no knowledge of what you
> may have explicitly defined. The same sort of thing happens in make files in Unix. 

Paulv is indeed correct here.  Using spawn will start a *new* process
(with a unique pid) and therefore it does not interact or have any
knowledge of the shell or environment variables you had when you started
IDL.  You might be able to pass the IDL '!PATH' variable in a string when
you use spawn, but you'll need to be careful this concatenated string of
path + command doesn't get too long.  Modifying your .login/.cshrc to
append the required path is the cleanest option by far.