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Full Discussion: Environment variables
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Environment variables Post 302631095 by rwa25 on Thursday 26th of April 2012 07:02:51 PM
Old 04-26-2012
Environment variables

I have read tons of posts about how you can't set persisting environment variable in a child script of a shell and have it persist. The only way is to source a file as

% . <scriptname>

I am finding that true... but I know there is a way around it. I just don't know how. I worked for 6 years at a company where you would set a bunch of environment variables that defined your work space with various tools. They were all very simple to use ex.:

% toolname argument
% echo $envVarFoo
% Bar

These variable drove everything about what directory you were in, how other tools behaved, and where your files were written to and read from. And there was nothing hacky/tricky for the user.

Shame on me for not better examining the tools, though they were extremely complicated. I do know they are made up of some Perl and Python mostly. I am writing a sweet of tools now to do various things. One thing I need to be able to do is set environment variables that don't die with the script. Can someone please point me in the right direction?! I know we didn't litter our system with hidden dot files either.

Begging for Help!
 

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ubuntu-dev-tools(5)						File Formats Manual					       ubuntu-dev-tools(5)

NAME
ubuntu-dev-tools - Configuration for the ubuntu-dev-tools package. DESCRIPTION
The ubuntu-dev-tools package is similar in scope to the devscripts(1) package, providing a collection of scripts which may be of use to Ubuntu and Debian developers or others wishing to build Debian packages. Some of these scripts have options which may be configured on a system-wide and per-user basis. These options are configured in devscripts.conf(5). All variables are described in the script's manpages. Package-wide variables begin with "UBUNTUTOOLS" and are listed below. Every script which reads the configuration files can be forced to ignore them by using the --no-conf command-line option. ENVIRONMENT
All ubuntu-dev-tools configuration variables can be set (and overridden) by setting them in the environment (unlike devscripts). In addition, several scripts use the following environment variables: UBUMAIL Overrides DEBEMAIL and DEBFULLNAME when the target is clearly Ubuntu. Can either contain an e-mail address or Full Name <email@example.org>. DEBEMAIL, DEBFULLNAME As in devscripts(1). PACKAGE-WIDE VARIABLES The currently recognised package-wide variables are: UBUNTUTOOLS_BUILDER This specifies the preferred test-builder, one of pbuilder (default), sbuild, pbuilder-dist. UBUNTUTOOLS_DEBIAN_MIRROR The preferred Debian archive mirror. Should be of the form http://ftp.debian.org/debian (no trailing slash). If not specified, the master will be used. UBUNTUTOOLS_DEBSEC_MIRROR The preferred Debian security archive mirror. Should be of the form http://security.debian.org (no trailing slash). If not speci- fied, the master will be used. UBUNTUTOOLS_UBUNTU_MIRROR The preferred Ubuntu archive mirror. Should be of the form http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu (no trailing slash). If not specified, the master will be used. UBUNTUTOOLS_UBUNTU_PORTS_MIRROR The preferred Ubuntu archive mirror. Should be of the form http://ports.ubuntu.com (no trailing slash). If not specified, the mas- ter will be used. UBUNTUTOOLS_LPINSTANCE The launchpad instance to communicate with. e.g. production (default) or staging. UBUNTUTOOLS_MIRROR_FALLBACK Whether or not to fall-back to the master archive mirror. This is usually the desired behaviour, as mirrors can lag the masters. If on a private network with only a local mirror, you may want to set this to no. One of yes (default) or no. UBUNTUTOOLS_UPDATE_BUILDER Whether or not to update the test-builder before each test build. One of yes or no (default). UBUNTUTOOLS_WORKDIR The directory to use for preparing source packages etc. When unset, defaults to a directory in /tmp/ named after the script. SEE ALSO
devscripts(1), devscripts.conf(5) AUTHORS
This manpage was written by Stefano Rivera <stefanor@ubuntu.com>. ubuntu-dev-tools December 19 2010 ubuntu-dev-tools(5)
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