The Form and Menu Language

User-defined variables

User-defined variables are names to which you may assign string values using the FMLI built-in utility set (see the set(1fmli) manual page for complete details on its use). You can assign values to variables in the local environment, available to the current FMLI session only:

   set -l name=value

NOTE: Local variables are available to all frames of your application, not just the frame in which they are set.

Or a variable can be made available to any application/process by placing the variable in a file, thus allowing another application (for example, another FMLI application) to retrieve the information:

   set -ffilename name=value

where name is a sequence of letters, digits, and underscores that begins with a letter or an underscore, value is a string, and filename is the pathname to a file that contains lines of the form name=value. If it does not already exist, filename will be created. Note that no spaces surround the equal sign (=).

The built-in utility set can also be used to set variables in the UNIX shell environment and export them to the current session and to its child processes:

   set -e name=value

The built-in utility unset can be used to remove a variable assignment (see the set(1fmli) manual page for complete details on its use).