exported variable not persisted after script execution

Question

I'm facing a wierd issue. I've a vm with solaris 11, and trying to write some bash scripts.

if, on the shell, I type :

export TEST=aaa 

and subsequently run:

set 

I correctly see a new environment variable named TEST whose value is aaa. If, however I do basically the same thing in a script. when the script terminates, I do not see the variable set. To make a concrete example, if in a file test.sh I have:

#!/usr/bin/bash echo 1: $TEST #variable not defined yet, expect to print only 1: echo 2: $USER TEST=sss echo 3: $TEST export TEST echo 4: $TEST 

it prints:

1: 2: daniele 3: sss 4: sss 

and after its execution, TEST is not set in the shell. Am I missing something? I tried both to do export TEST=sss and the separate variable set/export with no difference.

Answer 1

export - make variable available for child processes, but not for parent.

source - run script in shell without creating child process

For exalmpe, persistent variable can be realised by writing to file

#!/usr/bin/bash echo 1: $TEST #variable not defined yet, expect to print only 1: CONFIGFILE=~/test-persistent.vars if [ -r ${CONFIGFILE} ]; then # Read the configfile if it's existing and readable source ${CONFIGFILE} fi echo 2: $TEST echo 3: $USER TEST=sss echo 4: $TEST echo TEST="$TEST"> ${CONFIGFILE} echo 5: $TEST 

Answer 2

To make your variables visible, you need to source the script which exports your variables. See man source.