{ claus.conrad }

Set environment variable for one command with csh

πŸ“… Sep 23, 2014
βŒ› 1 minute

Setting an environment variable for the next command is easy with bash - as it turns out, also with csh. Here's how:

TL;DR: Run this:

env ENV_VAR_NAME=ENV_VAR_VALUE command

On most machines I use, bash is the default shell, or at least available (yes, also on the Windows box where I am typing this post). I am not a fanatic bash user, most shells work just fine. But being used to β€œthe bash way”, where setting environment variables for the next run command is pretty easy (KEY=VALUE command), it tricks me up each time I have to use csh on FreeBSD. (Sure, I could just install bash there too, but I prefer using included tools and installing as few dependencies as necessary.) So each time I use FreeBSD, I have to look this up on Google. This being Unix, there are of course several solutions. The one I found earlier today and which worked fine for me was this:

env KEY=VALUE command