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Programming Python, 3rd Edition
book

Programming Python, 3rd Edition

by Mark Lutz
August 2006
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1600 pages
51h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Shell Environment Variables

Shell variables, sometimes known as environment variables, are made available to Python scripts as os.environ, a Python dictionary-like object with one entry per variable setting in the shell. Shell variables live outside the Python system; they are often set at your system prompt or within startup files and typically serve as system-wide configuration inputs to programs.

In fact, by now you should be familiar with a prime example: the PYTHONPATH module search path setting is a shell variable used by Python to import modules. By setting it once in your system startup files, its value is available every time a Python program is run. Shell variables can also be set by programs to serve as inputs to other programs in an application; because their values are normally inherited by spawned programs, they can be used as a simple form of interprocess communication.

Fetching Shell Variables

In Python, the surrounding shell environment becomes a simple preset object, not special syntax. Indexing os.environ by the desired shell variable’s name string (e.g., os.environ['USER']) is the moral equivalent of adding a dollar sign before a variable name in most Unix shells (e.g., $USER), using surrounding percent signs on DOS (%USER%), and calling getenv("USER") in a C program. Let’s start up an interactive session to experiment:

>>>import os
>>> os.environ.keys( ) ['WINBOOTDIR', 'PATH', 'USER', 'PP2HOME', 'CMDLINE', 'PYTHONPATH', 'BL*ER', 'X', 'TEMP', 'COMSPEC', 'PROMPT', ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009259Supplemental ContentErrata Page