Motivation: xfce4-terminal runs as a terminal and doesn't propagate environment variables, which makes it a bit cumbersome to use it with complex `guix environment` setups. While an upstream fix would be nice, this is a general problem and one that shouldn't require special handling in every application.
Partial solution: Saving environment variables is relatively easy, just use `env -0`. Since they are all C strings, they can't contain null bytes. Serialization solved. Loading is a bit more difficult, at least if you want to make the solution Bourne Shell friendly. Yes, I too am planning to try Ambrevar's Lisp shell setup, but until then, I need something that works with regular old (bad) Unix tools. This is what I have so far: ``` xargs -x0a <(env -0) -- sh -c 'env - $@ tcc -version' ``` Explanation: xargs: -a lets us load the environment variables from a file, which sidesteps expansions -0 uses null terminated string format, instead of splitting on whitespace -x makes sure that even in the unlikely case when we run into execve limits, xargs still won't split the argument list and will just error instead sh: we need it (or some other wrapper) because xargs can only append argument lists or insert single arguments, but can't insert argument lists, so we reorder them to come before the fixed arguments we want to pass to the command. This mostly works in isolation, but the most important use case - starting a new Zsh session - doesn't. ``` xfce4-terminal -x xargs -x0a <(env -0) -- 'env - $@ zsh' ``` This results in a terminal popping up and closing immediately. It also has the significant downside that trying to wrap it into a script that passes arbitrary arguments to the command will require escaping things for sh again. Any ideas on how to proceed?
