set_variable

Sets an environment variable.

On UNIX, both the variable's name and value can be arbitrary byte strings, except that the variable's name cannot contain '='. On Windows, they should be in UTF-8.

Note that on some systems, when variables are overwritten, the memory used for the previous variables and its value isn't reclaimed.

You should be mindful of the fact that environment variable handling in UNIX is not thread-safe, and your program may crash if one thread calls set_variable while another thread is calling getenv. (And note that many functions, such as gettext, call getenv internally.) This function is only safe to use at the very start of your program, before creating any other threads (or creating objects that create worker threads of their own).

If you need to set up the environment for a child process, you can use @get to get an environment array, modify that with set_variable and unset_variable, and then pass that array directly to execvpe , spawn_async, or the like.

Parameters:

Returns: