Environment space??

[randy_...@comcast.net]

Folks, I've been hunting this in documentation for a long time now...
I am trying to establish what the limits are on environment space, and
how to actually calculate usage of it. I am wondering if usage is
cumulative when creating a sub shell.

Our application generates something like this:

- 10 to 15K of variables generated and exported at login. (Does this
space include variable names, or just their values??)
- 3 to 4K of variables generated at application initialization, also
exported
- General use functions are loaded and exported at application
initialization. Script is 40K long. Expect 20K of actual code. (We
tend to document inline very well!)
- We can easily find ourselves 4, 5, 6 shells deep in some cases even
more.

Can anyone tell us how much space is available? Are functions in that
same space? When spawning a subshell do exported varriables and
functions duplicate themselves into the new shell or are they kept in a
common space. Does each shell have a fresh environment space, or do
they share the base parents allocation?

Anything that can help us here is appreciated.

Thanks

R Boback
Quincy MA