penv - the persistent environment utility

Peter Pentchev

$Ringlet: c/misc/penv/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/penv/penv.sgml,v 1.4 2002/03/22 07:50:36 roam Exp $

This article describes the goals, usage and development history of penv, a utility to manage persistent per-directory environment settings.

Table of Contents
1. What is penv?
2. penv development history
3. Building and installing penv
4. Using penv
5. Compatibility and interoperability
6. A brief look at the penv source tree

1. What is penv?

penv is a utility which helps manage persistent per-directory environment settings. In other words, it saves you the trouble of setting or specifying the same environment variables over and over again when executing programs in a specific directory. The main reason for the initial development of penv was its use with the FreeBSD Ports Collection , but it may be used for other day-to-day tasks, too.

For its operation, penv needs to run an ``environment processor'' - a program that sets up the environment according to the contents of files in a given directory. By default, penv uses for its environment processor the envdir command from Dr. Dan J. Bernstein's daemontools package, available at http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html.