On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 02:09:59PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote: > > > 'COLUMNS=200 dpkg -l > foo' > > > > radical. thanks. > > > > Doing that without a semicolon would *never* have occurred to me. > > It's a shell trick. > > You can set an environment variable for the _current process_ by > specifying it first on the command line. I usually exploit it to get a > date/time for some other location, e.g.: > > $ TZ=Australia/Sydney date > $ TZ=UK/London date If you're really desperate, check out the 'env' command; you can set up an environment that's completely unlike the one in which it was invoked. We have some build tools that need serveral environment variables set, and when I'm working out of different CVS sandboxes env has been a lifesaver for me :) It's also great when testing scripts that make use of environment vars, especially if they test to see whether one is set or not. Cheers, -- Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better Micromuse Ltd. | than a perfect plan tomorrow. mailto:nnorman@micromuse.com | -- Patton
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