On 14 Jan 1998, Kai Henningsen wrote: > If program foo expects the environment variable BAR=/var/lib/fubar, an > easy way to make it comply to this policy is to rename foo to foo-real, > and write a wrapper shell script > > #! /bin/sh > BAR=/var/lib/fubar > foo-real "$@" > > [I hope I got that right!] > > NOTE: This may not work if the program decides what to do based on the > name it is called with. Fortunately, this is rare.
One thing you could do, since users are not supposed to call foo-real directly (but should be able to do so if they really want it), you could place it in a directory like /usr/lib/foo/ and perhaps leave the name to be `foo'. The script would become: #!/bin/sh BAR=/var/lib/fubar export BAR exec /usr/lib/foo/foo "$@" Note: I use `exec', I think it's better in a case like this Note: If you don't `export' BAR, the program will not know about it Remco
