How to let bash subshell to inherit parent's set options?

Question

Let’s say I do set -x in a script “a.sh”, and it invokes another script “b.sh”.

Is it possible to let “b.sh” inherit the -x option from “a.sh”?

Answer 1

export SHELLOPTS 

for example:

echo date > b chmod +x b 

without the export, we only see the commands in ./a when it calls ./b:

$ echo ./b > a $ bash -xv a  ./a + ./b Sun Dec 29 21:34:14 EST 2013 

but if we export SHELLOPTS, we see the commands in ./a and ./b

$ echo "export SHELLOPTS; ./b" > a $ bash -xv a  ./a + ./b  date ++ date    Sun Dec 29 21:34:36 EST 2013