Changing parent process environment (one mo time)

["Bill Waters" <wwwaters prismnet com>]

Hate to be a nag but some of you said "No Way" others "Yes" and some
"Maybe"....

So....I'll try to state it a little bit differently:

If I enter "export FOO=bar" from the command line and the enter "env" again
from the
command line I will get a list of the environment variables which will
include "FOO=bar"....

So far any thing else I have tried (my own code) to cause an equivalent
thing to happen
in a shell script or perl program is only valid while the script/program is
running, once
they exit to the original shell the environment remains unchanged.....

Questions: 1. Am I just not doing this right or is this an unreasonable
expectation?
                    2. How is it that the command "export" is able to do
this? (obviously it is
                         someone's code)

NOTE: I do appreciate all the replies I received, haven't tried all of them
yet......guess I'm
just a hard-headed old hacker that want's to understand....

Bill Waters