What you want to do works (as you should know, you did try it before asking, didn't you?)

What the statement means is that if a Perl program (and this is not limited to Perl, it's an OS thing that applies to all processes) executes a shell (or some other program) using system, and said shell or program sets or modifies an environment variable, this new value is only visible from that shell or program, and any other programs it calls. It's not noticeble from the Perl program that called the shell.

In fact, it's not unlike local.

Perl --((8:>*

In reply to Re: shell script via perl (clarification) by Perl Mouse
in thread shell script via perl (clarification) by toronto75

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