Exported (ba)sh functions in the environment

[Philip Ashmore <contact@philipashmore.com>]

Hi there.

I recently had cause to search for an environment variable to see if it 
was being set.
As a result I noticed that the environment has become a bit of a dumping 
ground for
installed programs where configuration files would have been a cleaner 
option.

Looking for an override in the environment is of course a good idea, but 
setting
default values in the environment that could be

1. hard coded in the programs as defaults
2. stored in a configuration file
3. sourced from a configuration script

is a bit sloppy.

On my machine running "set > set.txt && ls -lsa set.txt" reveals that my
environment contains 225517 of "stuff" - some of it is even being taken 
up by
exported function definitions!

That's 225517 bytes that needs to be copied every time a script runs.

Regards,
Philip Ashmore