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11:00 PM

A: How do I source another process's environment variables?

The following will convert each environment variable into an export statement, properly quoted for reading into a shell (because LS_COLORS, for example, is likely to have semicolons in it), then sources it. [The printf in /usr/bin, unfortunately, generally doesn't support %q, so we need to call ...

^^^^ please upvote this answer and downvote the three with horrible lack of escaping

All the others utterly fail if the value of any environment variable contains characters that the shell expands

terdon

@Gilles Done. That's a very nice answer. But can environmental variables contain newlines?

Ah, yes, obviously of course they can. PS1 comes to mind. Never mind.

Graeme

11:42 PM

^^^For all yee reading the above, please don't DV me. I added an answer with other ways to address this issue.

Gilles

@Graeme amended

Graeme

Apart from the fact that the last one was vulnerable to variable expansion, fixed now though.

terdon

@fr00tyl00p export EXAMPLE="No, you aren't quite there yet" — Gilles 5 mins ago

You have a sarcastic streak in you Gilles.

Gilles

@Graeme not quite (but best in show so far). One problem is easily fixed: sed "s/'/'\''/g; s/=/='/; s/$/'/" (otherwise you end up with some spurious quotes)

but then there's the problem of multi-line values, harder to fix

Graeme

@Gilles Oops, yes, just use printf %s

Gilles

11:53 PM

@Graeme no, won't help

echo is actually fine here, because VAR=VALUE never looks like an option

but think of VAR="" vs VAR=$'\n'

Graeme

@Gilles ah

Gilles

oh, and read -d "" to read null-separated fields isn't POSIX