what does export do?

[THUFIR HAWAT]

On 5/20/05, akonstam at trinity.edu <akonstam at trinity.edu> wrote:
...
> There is some confusion here. If we have a line:
> export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.
> 
> in a script. What export does is have $PATH available to 
> subshells of
> the shell running the script. If you source the script then the
> subshell is the shell providing the command line and $PATH will 
> an
> environment variable accessible to all programs running in that 
> shell.
...

"source the script" means write a script?  pardon, would you expand on
that sentence, please?


thanks,

Thufir