[Arjen Markus] (14 March 2003) Many of my company's programs rely on the presence of environment variables. Sometimes because third-party packages do, sometimes to find our own configuration files, sometimes because the operating system uses them to find the shared/dynamic libraries. (See [Extending the DLL Search Path on Windows])

It has been a great sorrow to me that full-scale installation scripts are needed to make such simple things possible as extending the PATH variable under [Microsoft Windows] and that if you need to do it manually, you have to open any of a wildly varying collection of windows to achieve what you want. 
It seems so much simpler under [Unix]. And I have never had "out of environment space" issues there.

The other day, I suddenly realised that there is no need to set these variables in the arcane ways of Windows: just use a small Tcl script. Using [Tclkit] has additional advantages:

   * No need to install Tcl separately
   * No DOS box appearing 
  
So, instead of defining MYVAR and extending PATH in the System panel, or whatever it is called today, just do:

   set ::env(MYVAR) "Whatever"
   lappend ::env(PATH) "c:/myprogramdir"

   exec myprog.exe &

When the exec command completes, the script is ended and so is Tclkit. But my program is running ...

[MHo]: This is because the newly executed myprog.exe inherits the environment table from its parent process.
P.S.: You don't have to struggle with windows dialogs to manipulate the environment permanently; take a look at the '''setx.exe'''-Utility from the resource-kit.

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[Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming] - [Category Windows]
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