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Re: global environment variables?



On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 10:44:44PM -0500, dman wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 04:30:11PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
> | 
> | I don't know offhand how you could make a variable visible to all cron
> | jobs globally. There is a basic problem there, that each user has his
> | own crontab file, and can set or override variables as he pleases.
> 
> This is a problem? ;-).  I like it when users can do their own thing,
> especially when I am a user on a sytem (without root access).

I am fully in support of users being able to set their own environment,
or override the system-provided environment. (hell, my variable-delay
fetchmail script does exactly this. it looks for the $INSIDECRON and
acts appropriately, compared to being run from the commandline)

However, in my case, I specifically WANT to set that global variable.
For the curious, it's http_proxy and ftp_proxy that I want set - my ISP
enforces use of a proxy server for http, and encourages it for ftp.
Without this set, *anything* that tries to talk out on port 80 is gonna
fail.

I don't want to have to set this in a myriad of places for various system
components, and have to remember to keep them all up to date with software
updates and new system components. (I also don't want to have to reset
all this if, for some reason, I need to *change* the proxy server... 

.../Nemo



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