Linux environment variables referencing other variables - linux

I am using a boot script from a network vendor, I am using this on RedHat 7.2 The start script sets up the environment with several variables, however I don't think these variables are set-up correctly.
I have added the start-up script to /etc/environment and I can see that the variables are defined and available to all users.
This is an example of how the variables are defined in the script:
export V1=/opt/nameofsupplier/sdk/CentOS-RHEL-7-x86_64
export V2=${V1}/lib/cam
There are many more, if I try this from a terminal:
cd $V1
It works fine, however if I try:
cd $V2
I get:
base: cd $V1/lib/cam: No such file or directory
The path is valid, and if I do this in the shell:
export V2=${V1}/lib/cam
cd $V2
It works without any error, how do I fix the script?

You may be right in suspecting an ill-definition of these variables.
/etc/environment can only contain variable definitions - it is not executed like a normal script (see its documentation here, which says Variable expansion does not work in /etc/environment.), so no variable expansion of V1 in the definition of V2 takes place. Therefore V2 is not correctly defined.
Try to source /etc/environment lines in the system-wide /etc/profile (or its equivalent, depending on the shells of your users) or in specific users' ~/.profiles.As the last resort you can just plain copy the respective lines of /etc/environment to the above mentioned scripts (but this will make it harder to maintain).
You could also correct the definitions in /etc/environment not to rely on expansion, i.e. like this:
export V2=/opt/nameofsupplier/sdk/CentOS-RHEL-7-x86_64/lib/cam
(assuming there are not too much of them to be corrected). But this will also be hard to maintain.

Related

setting environment variables on Linux startup

There are several entries in stackoverflow to this subject.
e.g. here
Why does it not work on my computer with Debian-10 (Buster)? I did 3 trial:
put a file named 90java.conf below /etc/environment.d holding
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java
put a file named java-env.sh below /etc/profile.d holding
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java
add the same text at the end to /etc/profile
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java
and restarted Debian at each trial.
Than opened a command window and entered
echo $JAVA_HOME
The response was always an empty line. Like to understand what I do not have grasped about environment variables on startup.
added later:
Entering the export statement to /etc/bash.bashrc solved my problem.
However, I'd like to understand what is different to the /etc/environment or /etc/profile approach. Why do environment variables do not show up in that case?
Setting like this are only relevant in a specific context. For example your shell, where you want to work with software and tools.
Thus, the solution is actually much simpler than all what you have tried. You have to do this in your private/local environment. But it depends on your shell.
If you have bash (or similar shells bash, sh, dash,...) best is edit the file ~/.profile and add export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java there. If you have other shells find our the correct equivalent file. For csh it would be ~/.cshrc etc.

Android Studio - cmake - access environement variable?

This question is specific to using cmake as part of Android Studio build process.
I'm using Android Studio 2.2 preview 7 on linux (ubuntu)
Inside the CMakeLists.txt I am able to access the Android NDK path using: ${ANDROID_NDK}
But how can I access:
Any environment variable ?
If not possible, at least the Android SDK path ?
I already tried to used $ENV{name_of_the_environment_variable_here} but it's always empty, even if the environment variable exist. I guess that when gradle invoke cmake it "hide" the env var somehow.
I don't think you can use $ENV, it's just an example of a variable because they're environment variables. However, you should be able to type env and hit enter for a list of the variables you currently have set. Then, the ones you see in the list, you can invoke by typing $VARIABLE_NAME, using a command before them to get them to do something. E.g. echo $VARIABLE will echo your variable to stdout.
I'm not sure how $ANDROID_SDK was set, if it was part of an install process, etc. but generally you would set user environment variables in .profile, .bash_profile or .bashrc configuration files. These files are read by the shell in that order. System-wide variables are set in /etc/environment, /etc/profile, and /etc/bash.bashrc, but you probably don't want to mess with those (most distros encourage making ancillary additions in /etc/profile.local, but that's a story for another answer).
It doesn't particularly matter which one of these files you use, unless what you're trying to do interacts with the order in which they are loaded. Generally, I look for where the variables have been set by either the OS or other stuff I've added and put them near those. You can find where environment variables are set by typing:
% for i in .profile .bash_profile .bashrc; do grep -H PATH $HOME/$i; done
(% is the prompt, don't type %)
.. and this will loop through the 3 files and show you if a user $PATH is set in any of them.
Bash uses the export ENV command as opposed to set ENV, which is from the original sh, which AFAIK is only default on FreeBSD and derivatives like pfSense anymore. Almost all other OS use Bash by default, except MacOS which recently moved to zsh and also uses export, and OpenBSD which uses ksh (nobody uses OpenBSD).
If you want to verify which shell you are using, type echo $SHELL, or echo $0 and hit enter, and it should let you know.
You can add the environment variable ephemerally by typing this command in your bash terminal and pressing enter:
% export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/home/username/AndroidSDK
To be clear, this is an example path, so it'd be best to use the actual path in which your android SDK files reside. However, this example was a default install location Android Studio tried to use when I installed it recently, so if you're not sure where they are, it's probably a good place to check.
To have a more permanent setting of your environment variable, open a text editor and add the line above to one of the configuration files I mentioned in the first paragraph (they'll be in your $HOME folder). Or, you can run this from the prompt and it'll add it to your file automatically:
% echo 'export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/home/username/AndroidSDK' >> $HOME/.bashrc
Take care to use two angle brackets and not one, as one angle bracket will overwrite the entire file with the single line.
How can I access Any environment variable ?
If you're not sure which folder is $HOME, try typing cd $HOME and hitting enter - that'll take you there. That's how you access environment variables - use a command with the invocation of the variable and it should act as if you had typed out the entire thing.
To access environment variables, type echo $NAME_OF_VARIABLE and it should echo it to the screen. If you want to search your three config files I mentioned in the beginning for where an environment variable is set, you can use grep as I did earlier, just changing the search string for whatever you're looking for. E.g. (while in $HOME):
% grep SDK_ROOT .bashrc .profile .bash_profile
Or you can type env to list all the currently set variables and filter them by piping the output to the grep command:
% env | grep SDK
If you want to just list all of the set variables and root around the entire thing, just type env instead of piping it to grep (grep's a filter).
Lastly, I'll give you an example of my $ANDROID_SDK_ROOT $ANDROID_SDK and $SDK_ROOT variables in my .bashrc - I noticed while installing these tools, they use all three (isn't that fun?):
% grep ANDROID .bashrc
export ANDROID_SDK=$HOME/development/Android/SDK
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=$HOME/development/Android/SDK
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_SDK:$JAVA_HOME:$ANDROID_SDK/cmdline-tools/latest/bin:$ANDROID_SDK/build-tools/32.0.0:$ANDROID_SDK/emulator:$ANDROID_SDK/emulator/bin64:$ANDROID_SDK/tools:$ANDROID_SDK/tools/bin:$ANDROID_SDK/extras:$ANDROID_SDK/platform-tools:$HOME/development/AndroidStudio/bin
export ANDROID_STUDIO=$HOME/development/AndroidStudio
% grep SDK_ROOT .bashrc
export SDK_ROOT=$HOME/development/Android/SDK
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=$HOME/development/Android/SDK
Hope that answers some questions, sorry it took so long to give you a response.

Set a temporary environment ($PATH)

I may fall into a X-Y problem with this question and I encourage you guys to correct me if I am wrong.
I would like to configure a toolchain environment that can work on different platforms and compiler versions. I initially wrote a long Perl script that generates a configuration Makefile that contain only variables. I wanted to be simple so I did not write anything complex using automake or autoconf. Moreover I wanted the reconfiguration process to be very fast. In my case my own written ./configure does everything in less than a second. I am very happy with that.
However I feel I can use a better approach using environment variables. Instead of writing a Makefile with the specific variables I can set the current shell environment directly. For example:
export cc=gcc
Unfortunately, some variables are already declared in the $PATH. The solution is to add the new $PATH in the front of the other:
export PATH=/new/toolchain/path:$PATH
echo $PATH
/new/toolchain/path:/old/toolchain/path:/usr/bin:/bin...
I feel this is ugly I would like to remove the old path before adding the new one.
To conclude:
Is it better to use the environment instead of custom makefiles to set a build configuration?
How to properly adjust existing environment variables?
When I have several variables to set, I write a wrapper script which I then use as a prefix to the command that I want to modify. That lets me use the prefix either
applying to a single command, such as make, or
initializing a shell, so that subsequent commands use the altered settings.
I use wrappers for
setting compiler options (such as clang, to set the CC variable, making configure scripts "see" it as the chosen compiler),
setting locale variables, to test with POSIX C versus en_US versus en_US.UTF-8, etc.
testing with reduced environments, such as in cron.
Each of the wrappers does what is needed to identify the proper PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and similar variables.
For example, I wrote this ad hoc script about ten years ago to test with a local build of python:
#!/bin/bash
ver=2.4.2
export TOP=/usr/local/python-$ver
export PATH=$TOP/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`newpath -n LD_LIBRARY_PATH -bd $TOP/lib $TOP/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/$ver`
if test -d $TOP
then
exec $*
else
echo no $TOP
exit 1
fi
and used it as with-python-2.4.2 myscript.
Some wrappers simply call another script.
For example, I use this wrapper around the configure script to setup variables for cross-compiling:
#!/bin/sh
# $Id: cfg-mingw,v 1.7 2014/09/20 20:49:31 tom Exp $
# configure to cross-compile using mingw32
BUILD_CC=${CC:-gcc}
unset CC
unset CXX
TARGET=`choose-mingw32`
if test -n "$TARGET"
then
PREFIX=
test -d /usr/$TARGET && PREFIX="--prefix=/usr/$TARGET"
cfg-normal \
--with-build-cc=$BUILD_CC \
--host=$TARGET \
--target=$TARGET \
$PREFIX "$#"
else
echo "? cannot find MinGW compiler in path"
exit 1
fi
where choose-mingw32 and cfg-normal are scripts that (a) find the available target name for the cross-compiler and (b) provide additional options to the configure script.
Others may suggest shell aliases or functions. I do not use those for this purpose because my command-line shell is usually tcsh, while I run these commands from (a) other shell scripts, (b) directory editor, or (c) text-editor. Those use the POSIX shell (except of course, for scripts requiring specific features), making aliases or functions of little use.
You can create an individualized environment for a particular command invocation:
VAR1=val1 VAR2=val2 VAR3=val3 make
I find this cleaner than doing:
export VAR1=val1
export VAR2=val2
export VAR3=val3
make
unless you're in a wrapper script and maybe even then as with
VAR1=val1 VAR2=val2 VAR3=val3 make the VAR variables will be whatever they were before the make invocation (including but not limited to unexported and nonexistent).
Long lines is a non-issue, you can always split it across several lines:
VAR1=val1\
VAR2=val2\
VAR3=val3\
make
You can set up environment variables like this for any Unix command.
The shell will all set it up.
Some applications (such as make or rake) will modify their environment based on arguments that look like variable definitions (see prodev_paris's answer), but that depends on the application.
Is it better to use the environment instead of custom makefiles to set a build configuration?
The best practice for build systems is to not depend on any environment variables at all. So that nothing more is necessary to build your project than:
git clone ... my_project
make -C my_project
Having to set environment variables is error prone and may lead to inconsistent builds.
How to properly adjust existing environment variables?
You may not need to adjust those at all. By using complete paths to tools like compilers you disentangle your build system from the environment.
As we all know, it is preferrable to integrate standard tools for a task like building your products instead of creating your own approach. The effort usually pays off in the long term.
That being said, a simple approach would be to define different environment files (e.g. build-phone.env) setting working directory, PATH, CC etc. for your different products and source your environment files interactively on demand:
. /path/to/build-phone.env
[your build commands]
. /path/to/build-watch.env
[your build commands]
I think you may benefit from using direct variable definition when you call your makefile, like in the following:
make FOO=bar target
Where FOO is the variable you want to set with value bar.
Note that in this case it take precedence over environment definition! So you can easily override your PATH variable...
Please have a look at this detail topic for more info: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2826178/4716013

When I execute bash, the $PATH keeps repeating itself

I have added entries such as the following in my /etc/bashrc (on Fedora).
#=========== Maven Related variables
export JAVA_HOME='/usr/java/default'
export PATH=${JAVA_HOME}:$PATH
#=========== Maven Related variables
export M2_HOME=/usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-3.0.4
export PATH=${M2_HOME}/bin:$PATH
#=========== Ant Related variables
export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/apache-ant
export Path=${ANT_HOME}/bin:$PATH
Now, each time that I execute bash command to refresh the environment variables, all these additions are repeated, and the PATH just keep adding itself recursively; if I keep doing bash for a few dozen times, then the $PATH becomes a hundred lines of repeating content. What am I doing wrong?
Note that I have added these entries to /etc/bashrc since I want to have these values in PATH no matter what user I login as.
Thanks,
Shannon
Don't set your PATH incrementally in .bashrc; set it once in .profile and leave it alone thereafter. Or, since you mention /etc/bashrc, don't set the PATH incrementally in /etc/bashrc; set it once in /etc/profile and leave it alone.
One side-benefit; things will work a little faster.
See also the code in How do I manipulate PATH elements in shell scripts for code to clean up a repetitive PATH.
If by this statement:
... execute bash command to refresh the environment variables ...
you mean that you are entering the command
bash
at the command prompt, you are not "refreshing the environment variables". You are launching a new subshell of the current shell. The new shell inherits the path of the original shell, to which you are once again making additions. Each time you do this the PATH will get longer.
You can use something like:
PATH=$(echo "$PATH" | awk -v RS=: -v ORS=: '!(a[$0]++)' | sed 's/:$//')
to clean up your path after changing it. Also, since the the first match is used when scanning the path, having duplicates doesn't really matter.
I had also faced the same problem (CentOS). This is how I fixed it.
Added the following lines to my user's .profile
export PATH=/usr/local/apache-maven-3.3.3/bin:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
export SHELL=/bin/bash
# to run bash (because ksh was my default shell)
/bin/bash
No changes to my user's .bashrc file
No changes to /etc/profile
No changes to /etc/bashrc

Linux: setting environment variable with parts of another environment variable

I have an environment variable $GOPATH set in ~/.profile:
export GOPATH=$HOME/gopkgs:$HOME/code/go
Now I want to use $GOPATH to add the ./bin sub-directory of the two folders to $PATH, preferably in ~/.profile as well.
I am trying:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin:${GOPATH//://bin:}/bin
This only prevents me from logging into an X session. The distro is Linux Mint 11 x64.
What am I missing?
On my machine this works and
echo PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin:${GOPATH//://bin:}/bin
substitutes to:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/l1zard/go/bin:/home/l1zard/gopkgs/bin:/home/l1zard/code/go/bin
Therefore i would guess that you have an error in your .profile.
however using the less complicated
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/gopkgs/bin:$HOME/code/go/bin"
does not use fancy variable substitution but it should work. Also you do not need to log off and on again to make things work. you just need to source the .profile by typing:
source ~/.profile
This way you can also make sure that the .profile has no errors which might lead to not being able to log in to an X session.

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