How to make it such that, when running `command`, it automatically does `SOME_ENV_VAR=value command`? (something cleaner than aliases?) - Lemmy.run Fediverse

https://lemmy.run/post/28966

hello friends, I am looking for a way to do what I described in the title. When running command command, I dont want to have to type SOME_ENV_VAR=value command every time, especially if there are multiple. I am sure youre immediately thinking aliases. My issue with aliases is that if I do this for several programs, my .bashrc will get large and messy quickly. I would prefer a way to separate those by program or application, rather than put them all in one file. Is there a clean way to do this?

1 comments

dudeami0

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There might be a better way, but how I generally handle this is adding the ~/.local/bin directory to the start of the PATH env via ~/.bashrc like:

export PATH="${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}"

and creating a file with the name ~/.local/bin/command. This file will look something like what is below, note the full path to the real binary (/usr/bin/command in this case) else you'll get an endless recursion:

#!/bin/bash

export SOME_ENV_VAR=value
/usr/bin/command ${@}

Once you chmod +x ~/.local/bin/command, you can just call command and it will run it with the script which sets up the environment and passes the arguments to the actual binary.