On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 14:14:50 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 13:29:06 UTC, wobbles wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 12:54:28 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 12:28:19 UTC, wobbles wrote:
Any solutions that people know of?
You can't from an exe, it is a limitation of the operating
system (same on Linux btw, environment variable inheritance
is always from parent to child, never from child to parent).
The reason batch files can do it is that they don't run in a
separate process, they just run a batch of commands inside
the shell itself.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682009%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
"Altering the environment variables of a child process during
process creation is the only way one process can directly
change the environment variables of another process. A
process can never directly change the environment variables
of another process that is not a child of that process."
If you're an administrator, you could poke the system-wide
variables in the registry and tell the processes to reload
them:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682653%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
but of course, changing system-wide registry entries affects
way more than just your parent shell!
If you need to change a parent shell variable, the only way
is to do it from a batch file. You could perhaps run a .bat
which sets the variable and calls your exe to help it do some
work.
Thanks Adam,
Yeah, I knew it was the case in Linux, I just figured as 'set'
worked in a batch file that it must be possible in Windows.
I think what I'm going to do is have my D program output the
commands as strings that are required to set the ENV variables
in the parent and then have a batch file to run the program,
get its output and run the commands outputted from the D
program.
Can also have a bash file to do the same (using the source
command).
This is for setting up a build system we're using, and is
normally run via Jenkins, so running it in a kind of ugly way
doesnt really matter.
We're currently maintaining two seperate scripts to do this
work, I'm trying to consolidate them. Maintaining one
large-ish D script to do this work and 2 mini scripts to call
them should be easier to maintain than 2 large bash/batch
scripts.
Thanks!
You tried setx, and it didn't work ? Or you don't want to set
permanent environmental variables
Yep, correct. Don't want them to be permanent. The systems have
to be clean for other tests at all times, so they need to be on a
shell by shell basis sadly.
