comment on

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;
  }
}
[download]

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...

In reply to RE (tilly) 3: Get default login environment by tilly
in thread Get default login environment by tilly

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