From: utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: hacknews
Title: PATH in news, cont. 
Article-I.D.: utzoo.2094
Posted: Sat May 29 22:27:50 1982
Received: Sat May 29 22:27:50 1982

I now realize why setting PATH but not exporting it didn't work.  There
is a shell bug in that some aspects of behavior are different depending
on whether you are executing a shell file or a program, because things
like the "exported" status of a shell variable are inherited in shell
files (because the shell just forks and the daughter shell does not
reinitialize itself properly).  Hence news inherits the export status
of PATH in the user's main shell, which is "exported" for obvious reasons,
and changes news makes to PATH *do* get exported.