This is what is happening:

• Perl forks itself. The main program then wait()'s for the child to finish.
• The child gets a copy of everything that is in the parents environment (actually, it shares the memory using copy-on-write, but thats more detail than we need right now).
• When the child goes away, everything that was in the child's copy is destroyed.
• When the parent resumes operation, it has the same environment as before it forked since nothing ever actually changed it's copy.

If you need to have a second process alter the memory or environment of another process, you need to look into programming with threads or shared memory. Your other alternative would be inter-process communication.

We've already had a very similar discussion today that might help you; see Setting Env Variable question.

The backticks execute the command in a subshell; so you're not changing the environment of the script that calls that subshell (i.e. your perl script). So you're not really doing anything wrong, per se. That's a limitation of the shell, not Perl. If you want to modify the environment your perl script is running under, do it by modifiying the %ENV hash from within your script.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche

When referencing any code in your questions you should utilize <CODE> tags.

Now that thats out of the way, just dump using the sh script and update your variables via the %ENV hash as in $ENV{'JAVA_HOME'} etc.. However if sourcing existing sh files is mandantory, read the source file via your Perl script and regex for the name=value pairs and update the %ENV based on your results.

Thanks...i found the porblem in my perl script....i was using

$ENV{$key} = chomp($value};
[download]

Whicc is wrong. i should have used

chomp($value);
$ENV{$key} = $value;
[download]

thanks to tye....he/she saved the day..... Amit (amit_ra)