How to set an environment variable in emacs shell (eshell)?

Question

I cannot seem to find this anywhere. A lot of times I run commands with an environment variable set like:

export BLA=foo && ./somebinary

How do i do this in eshell? I think the command is called set but i'm not sure how to use it, what would be the above equivalent in eshell?

What about eshell "cd"-ed into a remote directory via tramp? — Lester Cheung, Jan 21 '14 at 00:37
To answer my own question - it depend on the transport methods used in tramp - I have been using "scpx" which uses a simple shell and thus not preserving the environment variables that I have setup. Changing it back to "scp" (or "ssh") worked! ;) — Lester Cheung, Jan 21 '14 at 00:47

score 23 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 05 '13 at 21:17

23

~ $ (setenv "XYZ" "abc")
abc
~ $ ./e.sh
abc
~ $ cat e.sh
echo $XYZ
~ $ (setenv "XYZ" "abc")
abc
~ $ ./e.sh
abc

answered Feb 05 '13 at 21:17

1

Why not just `setenv XYZ abc`? – Tobias Apr 30 '19 at 10:34
I don't remember :(. Maybe I was trying to make it more lisp like, for example I can use the function call in `init.el`, `\*scratch\*` buffer, or `eshell`. – Miserable Variable May 01 '19 at 19:17

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 28 '14 at 19:00

3

I set variables in my bash profile like so:

export WORK_DIR=/Users/me/Documents/some/dir

Then in .emacs I put this:

(let ((work_dir (shell-command-to-string ". ~/.bash_profile; echo -n $WORK_DIR")))
(setenv "WORK_DIR" work_dir))

answered Jul 28 '14 at 19:00

jekennedy

2 Answers2