No. A child process cannot affect the state of the parent in POSIX.

You can source, or . (dot) a shell script to do that.

In your file, no splatline needed,

# ~/file.rc
# do stuff
chdir /path/to
# do more stuff
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Then on the command line,

~>$ source file.rc
/path/to>$
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After Compline,
Zaxo

Thanks, but I tried to do it with source via a shell script, like
# main
#! /bin/sh

source "./changeDir" ;

# file changeDir
cd a

But that didn't work, can you tell me why ?

Luca

Found in /opt/perl/snap/lib/5.8.7/pods/perlfaq8.pod

I {changed directory, modified my environment} in a perl script. How come the change disappeared when I exited the script? How do I get my changes to be visible? (Unix)

In the strictest sense, it can't be done--the script executes as a different process from the shell it was started from. Changes to a process are not reflected in its parent--only in any children created after the change. There is shell magic that may allow you to fake it by eval()ing the script's output in your shell; check out the comp.unix.questions FAQ for details.

#!/usr/bin/perl

chdir shift or die "Failed to chdir: $!";
exec "/usr/bin/sh" or die "Failed to exec /usr/bin/sh: $!";

__END__
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    exec ./dir-changer new-directory
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