opensolaris man page for shell

shell(1F)							   FMLI Commands							 shell(1F)

NAME
       shell - run a command using shell

SYNOPSIS
       shell command [command] ...

DESCRIPTION
       The  shell  function  concatenate  its arguments, separating each by a space, and passes this string to the shell ($SHELL if set, otherwise
       /usr/bin/sh).

EXAMPLES
       Example 1 A sample output of shell command.

       Since the Form and Menu Language does not directly support background processing, the shell function can be used instead.

	 `shell "build prog > /dev/null &"`

       If you want the user to continue to be able to interact with the application while the background job is running, the  output  of  an  exe-
       cutable	run  by shell in the background must be redirected: to a file if you want to save the output, or to /dev/null if you don't want to
       save it (or if there is no output), otherwise your application may appear to be hung until the background job finishes processing.

       shell can also be used to execute a command that has the same name as an FMLI built-in function.

NOTES
       The arguments to shell will be concatenate using spaces, which may or may not do what is expected. The variables set in local  environments
       will not be expanded by the shell because "local" means "local to the current process."

ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO
       sh(1), attributes(5)

SunOS 5.11							    5 Jul 1990								 shell(1F)