Importing environment variables to Perl

Question

I\'m not sure if importing is the right word to use. I\'m a beginner in both Perl and Bash. I have set a variable on Bash, so when I do:

echo $PRDIR
         


        

Answer 1

If you want Bash to export a variable into the environment so it's accessible to programs, you can use the export builtin:

export PRDIR

Inside Perl, you would then access it using the %ENV hash:

my $varex = $ENV{"PRDIR"};
print "\$varex is: $varex\n";

Answer 2

Another solution to use the variable directly in perl :

In the shell :

$ export PRDIR=foobar

In perl :

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Modern::Perl;

use Env qw/PRDIR/;

say $PRDIR;

Answer 3

I guess you need something like this:

use Cwd 'abs_path';
use File::Basename;
my $self = abs_path($0);
my $bindir = dirname( abs_path($0) );
unless ($ENV{APP_ENV}) {
    warn "No APP_ENV, will try to get from bin/env.sh";
    exec("source $bindir/env.sh && /usr/bin/perl $self") || die "$!";
}

I have env.sh in my bin folder with following content:

export APP_ENV=development

The idea behind this approach is that I don't need to bother if I set my ENV variables before running my Perl code or forget to do it. I need just to run my Perl program and it will take care about preparing environment for itself.