Bash is very powerful for its ability to use all kinds of commands and pipe
information through them. But there is a single thing that is impossible to
achieve except using files on the hard drive or on /tmp. We need a new
declare -g (global) where a variable would have its contents changed by
subshells and keep it. I.e. all subshells may change the variable and this
will not be lost when the subshell exits. Also, a native semaphore
technology, so different code being executed in parallel would change the
variable in an orderly fashion.
I use GNU parallel extensively, basically, my entire business depends on
this technology, and now I need to use a database to pass information
between functions being executed, back to the main bash script. This is
basically ridiculous. At some point we need to turn Bash into more than a
shell, a power language. Now I do arbitrary math using embedded Python, but
the variable-passing restriction is a big roadblock.
Philip Orleans
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