I know this is an old post, but it seems to still be relevant. On both Solaris and Linux, I have always used a wrapper shell script to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc.

When I recently had to run a PERL script using Oracle as a CGI via an Apache web server, I found that I could use Apache's SetEnv directive to set these environmental vars in my httpd.conf file, like so:

SetEnv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /lib64:/lib:/opt/oraClient/11.2.0.2/lib
SetEnv ORACLE_HOME /opt/oraClient/11.2.0.2
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