Re: [PLUG] Distinguishing between environment variable with null value and one that is not set

["K.S. Bhaskar" <ksbhaskar@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 03:52:24PM -0400, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
>> It appears that POSIX shell (and bash) have no built-in way to
>> distinguish between the case where an environment variable exists with
>> a null value and the case where it simply does not exist.  The
>> simplest way I have been able to come up with is to grep the output of
>> env and test for zero length, e.g.:
>>
>> $ if [ -z "`env | grep foo`" ] ; then echo It doesn\'t exist\! ; fi
>> It doesn't exist!
>> $ if [ -z "`env | grep PWD`" ] ; then echo It doesn\'t exist\! ; fi
>> $
>>
>> Is there a better way?  Thanks in advance.
>
> Well, I don't know if it's *better*, but if you've got perl installed
> on the box you could always say
>
>  perl -e 'exit defined $ENV{foo}'
>
> which will set $? to either 1 or 0.
>
> But to be honest, instead of trying to come up with a solution to this
> problem, I'd probably concentrate on avoiding putting nulls in my
> environment variables in the first place.

[KSB] Perl is not an option.  I'm trying to package something to run
in as small a virtual machine as possible (testing on busybox on Tiny
Core Linux / Micro Core Linux).  But, building on Paul's suggestion,
what I have at the beginning of this script is:

if [ -n ${gtm_passwd+isset} ] ; then tmp_passwd=$gtm_passwd ; export
tmp_passwd ; unset gtm_passwd
else unset tmp_passwd ; fi

and at the end I have:

if [ -n ${tmp_passwd+issset} ] ; then gtm_passwd=$tmp_passwd ; export
gtm_passwd ; fi

So far, it seems to work, but I have more testing to do.  Thanks, all.

Regards
-- Bhaskar
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