http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=33661


in reply to RE: RE (tilly) 1: Get default login environment
in thread Get default login environment

Actually...try this on for size:
sub get_login_env { local %ENV; my $shell = shift || (getpwuid($<))[8]; my $env = `echo env | perl -e 'exec {"$shell"} -sh'`; if (wantarray) { my @pieces = ($env =~ m/^(.*?)=((?:[^\n\\]|\\.|\\\n)*)/gm); s/\\(.)/$1/g foreach @pieces; return @pieces; } else { return $env; } }
Doesn't that take care of everything about how the env function encodes the environment? I tried putting = and returns into the name of environment variables and it wouldn't go...

EDIT
I edited the RE slightly. I also should note that compared to the effort of launching a Perl process that execs itself into a login shell, a few invocations of the RE engine are unlikely to do much further damage...

UPDATE (Much later), Corion caught a silly missing | in the line that gets the environment. :-(

UPDATE 2 (Years later), as the discussion below points out, there was a silly syntax error. Fixed. Believe it or not, I used a version of this snippet for years, but that copy had been typed separately...