Re: [Help-smalltalk] How to access environment variables ?

[Paolo Bonzini]

> There are extra shell variables showing up like PATH, BASH, TERM, etc. 
> which do not show up in a CGI environment using any other language that
> I've used to write a similar CGI program (Perl, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, C,
> Tcl).  All of them print out the same variables as the output of the
> Perl script.  What we seem to  be doing in Smalltalk is forking/execing
> a shell and and then getting the environment variables so that we end up
> with variables from a hybrid environment of CGI and shell.

Yes, you're right that's suboptimal.

What is really needed is a package covering POSIX stuff, from
environment to process creation, in a nice object-oriented way.  Ideally
you could do something like

   redirections := SpawnParameters new
       stdin: (FileStream open: '/dev/null' mode: FileStream write);
       stdout: (FileStream newPipe: FileStream write);
       stderr: FileStream stderr;
       workingDirectory: '/'.
   process := redirections spawn: 'ls -lR'.
   s := [ process stdout readSide contents ] fork.
   process wait

Paolo