use Perl

Recently I needed to set some environment variables for a little project I was doing in BBEdit. Aqua applications do not really care about whatever shell I use in the terminal, so they do not read my login files.

Mac OS X does; however, read the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file when I log into my account. That environment is available to all applications.

Since I do not like to maintain the same information in two places, I made a short script to turn my shell environment into my environment.plist. I added a short function to Mac::PropertyList to turn a simple hash into a plist (I have not fully implemented the pieces to turn an arbitrary data structure into a plist, though).

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use Mac::PropertyList;
 
print Mac::PropertyList::create_from_hash( \%ENV )

From that I get a plist, which I can save as ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. I edited the output a bit to give you a flavor of the final plist. You can edit plists by hand or with the PropertyListEditor application.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>POP_USER</key>
        <string>comdog</string>
        <key>HISTFILESIZE</key>
        <string>3000</string>
        <key>RSYNC_RSH</key>
        <string>/usr/bin/ssh -l comdog</string>
        <key>PWD</key>
        <string>/Users/brian/Desktop</string>
        <key>CVSROOT</key>
        <string>/Users/brian/.cvs</string>
        <key>HOST</key>
        <string>g3.home.staceytappan.com</string>
        <key>EDITOR</key>
        <string>/usr/bin/vi</string>
        <key>PATH</key>
        <string>/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin</string>
        <key>SHELL</key>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/bash</string>
        <key>CVS_RSH</key>
        <string>ssh</string>
        <key>USER</key>
        <string>brian</string>
        <key>HOME</key>
        <string>/Users/brian</string>
</dict>
</plist>

At some point I can extend this to automatically recognize when my shell environment has a permanant change (e.g. .bash_profile changes) and then regenerate the environment.plist. I still have to log out and log in again for the changes to take effect, so I have to figure out how to hack that some time. If I can figure that out, I can make the process happen through some sort of scheduler magic or create a tool to "source" the plist.