env variables with spaces

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007, Net Llama! wrote:
>I'm running into an annoying problem.  I'm taking the output from 'env' 
>and dumping it to a file (/tmp/env.out), and then running 'source 
>/tmp/env.out'.  The problem is that some of the variables in env output 
>have values assigned to them with spaces, such as:
>FOO=release debug
>
>When source hits this, it gets confused and assumes that the ' debug' 
>portion is something separate from the value of FOO, and barfs:
>bash: release: command not found
>
>Anyone have any suggestions how to get around this?  thanks

Wrap all variables in double quotes.

env | sed 's/=\(.*\)/="\1"/' > /tmp/env.out
. /tmp/env.out

This doesn't take care of escaping double quotes in the value of
the variables.  That's left as an exercise for the student.

A safer way might be:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys
for k, v in os.environ.items:
    print '%s=%s' % (k, repr(k))
sys.exit(0)

Bill
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