Not so on UNIX-like systems. For example, I wrote a program that I called "to" on VMS. It was sort of like a super-duper "chdir" on UNIX. It had short term memory (remembered the last couple places you defaulted to) and long term memory (you could create aliases on the fly, shortcuts). When you said "$to disk:[dir]" you were there. You could add aliases like "$to add home sys$login" and from then on you could say "$to home" to get there.
In UNIX every program runs in its own process space (as it did in VMS) but does not have direct access to the environment variables of the shell from which the application was executed, at least not in a simple, callable method that I have yet to find.
I really want to write my own "to" program for mac os x, since I do a lot of bopping around via terminal. It would be nice to have it contained in an app with a little SQLite db instead of creating a billion bash aliases.
Oh well.
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