Re: nasty env vars

[Leo B. <le...@le...>]

Mark Lakata wrote:

 > We have one piece of software that requires a nasty env var to be
 > set. The environment variable contains double-quotes and curly
 > braces, for example:
 >
 > BEGIN{require"/foo/init.pl"}
 >
 > (perl hackers will recognize that as perl syntax. Don't ask me who
 > decided to store a perl one-liner in an env var!)

Hello, Mark.

Sorry, I'm gonna do it... WHO IN THE @*)!(*&% did this?  I
am guessing it's some bit of EDA software code, but I just
gotta know.

 > In csh, you can set it with
 >
 >  setenv FOO 'BEGIN{require"/foo/init.pl"}'
 >
 > However, you will be hardpressed to get this to work in a module!
 > Try it! The double quotes and the curly braces will ruin your day,
 > so if you tried that line "as is" in your modulefile, you will get
 > [snip]

I'd like to find a modules solution, but 30 minutes of experiments
has left me as frustrated as you (no, you probably fought with it
for longer than that...) so I'm going to suggest a punt --

Make a wrapper script.

We've been forced into this on some programs due to overruning the
PATH with all of the EDA tools we wish to load on a per-project
basis, so it wouldn't be totally without precedent in our env.  I
hope that's not too outside the norm in yours.

And in parallel, if the developer is still actively supporting the
program, ask him/her to fix it.  That's just plain nasty IMHO.

Regards,

- Leo