In our batch systems at work we primarily write our code in Perl. However, we have a number of small utilities written in shell that we use in debugging, plus we have a script that gets sourced on login that gives us access to our Database and other resources in the environment. In previous days we wrote a wrapper shell script which sourced the shell script prior to calling the Perl scripts, but this was tedious and you had to remember to use it if you ran one of the scripts from the command line, from cron, etc. Using this short bit of code, taking advantage of the '-s' option to Perl, we can eliminate the use of the wrapper script completely.

eval {
        exec ". ./env.sh; /usr/bin/perl -s $0 -env -- @ARGV";
} unless $env;
[download]

I've seen other solutions for this, but some rely on running the script as in a system() or open() call and then parsing the output of the 'env' command to read in and set any environment variables that were exported. If you've used other workarounds for this, I'd be interested in seeing those, too! Hope this helps someone out.

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