Where are Ksh User-Defined Variables stored on UNIX machine?

Question

Where are KornShell (ksh) User-Defined Variables (UDV) stored on a AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) machine?

Sample Commands:

@:/dir #variable=fooValue
@:/dir #echo $variable
fooValue

So is there a file on the AIX server with "fooValue" in text? Is the value stored in memory? Can the variable be sniffed out anyway?

Answer 1

The shell is a running process with its own little chunk of memory it gets dealt by the operating system.

As you define and set variables, the shell stores their names and values inside its own process memory.

When the shell process exits, that memory is released back to the operating system, and the variables and their values are lost.

Answer 2

it's certainly not stored on disk. You can access the memory region where the variables are stored using

extern char** environ; 

see man 5 environ.

But the less higher-level way is via

char * getenv(char * varname)

which returns you the value of a single environment variable (which ought to be part of the environ pointer list) See man 3 getenv