dssg/envfile

Name: envfile

Owner: Data Science for Social Good

Description: POSIX-compatible script like env to run a program in an environment modified by values set in a file

Created: 2017-12-07 01:08:42.0

Updated: 2017-12-07 01:38:36.0

Pushed: 2017-12-07 02:08:04.0

Homepage: null

Size: 2

Language: Shell

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README

envfile

POSIX-compatible script, like env, to run a program in an environment modified by values set in a file at the specified path.

This achieves the same as:

env NAME1=VALUE1 NAME2=VALUE2 make -d info

or, in shells which support it, omitting env:

NAME1=VALUE1 NAME2=VALUE2 make -d info

with the distinction that these values may be persisted to a file:

# dev.env

# The first setting
NAME1=VALUE1

# Oh and this is the second one
NAME2=VALUE2

and loaded into the execution environment:

envfile dev.env make -d info

like in the previous, on-the-fly examples, without polluting the user's shell environment.

Alternatives

It should be noted that something similar may be achieved with the source operator in a subshell:

(. dev.env && echo $NAME1)

which does not pollute the invoking environment.

However, the above only works for inline variable references, such as echo $NAME1. Any subprocess, such as make -d info, will not have access to the environment values declared by the environment file, unless this file uses export:

# dev.env

# The first setting
export NAME1=VALUE1

# Oh and this is the second one
export NAME2=VALUE2