How to pass an environment variable to an xterm session

Leo Simon · 05-18-2009, 01:09 PM

Hi

I have multiple xterm sessions open at once. They have different numbers of columns. I want my editor (vi) to be able to distinguish between sessions with many and sessions with few columns. If I could set an environment variable when I open an xterm session, all would be fine, but am unable to do this. The following *should* work I believe,
"xterm -e "setenv LINELENGTH=178", but whenever I use the -e flag, the xterm session flashes on then off. Another alternative that would work is if I could read the Identify table that I can get from left-clicking at the top left corner of the session screen. Then I could parse the Geometry field. But I'm unable to call up the that table from within a shell.

Any help would be most appreciated!

Leo

norobro · 05-18-2009, 01:26 PM

Don't know whether this will help or not, but try "-hold"

Leo Simon · 05-18-2009, 01:40 PM

Thanks norobro.

Trouble with the -hold flag is that it prevents me from using the terminal session interactively. For example, xterm -hold -e ls
opens an xterm window, lists files but doesn't return me to a command prompt. Any suggestions as to how to get this to happen?

norobro · 05-18-2009, 02:46 PM

How about:

Code:

xterm -e "export LINELENGTH=178;bash"

i92guboj · 05-18-2009, 03:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leo Simon

Hi

I have multiple xterm sessions open at once. They have different numbers of columns. I want my editor (vi) to be able to distinguish between sessions with many and sessions with few columns. If I could set an environment variable when I open an xterm session, all would be fine, but am unable to do this. The following *should* work I believe,
"xterm -e "setenv LINELENGTH=178", but whenever I use the -e flag, the xterm session flashes on then off. Another alternative that would work is if I could read the Identify table that I can get from left-clicking at the top left corner of the session screen. Then I could parse the Geometry field. But I'm unable to call up the that table from within a shell.

Any help would be most appreciated!

Leo

That's to be expected. You are not opening a shell so it just runs that command and exits.

You need to run bash (or you could run vim or whatever directly if that's all you need, that way you don't waste memory on something you won't be using anyway).

So the suggestion above should work, but there's no need really to be that cryptic, just exporting the variable on the current shell will work the same.

Code:

$ export foo=bar
$ urxvtc #or xterm or whatever
#in the new term
$ echo $foo
bar

When a variable is marked for exportation, it's copied into the environment of all the new subshells that are opened from that one where you exported the variable.

PS: it really can be even simpler:

Code:

foo=bar xterm

Leo Simon · 05-18-2009, 05:32 PM

Thanks again to norobro and to i92guboj for your reply.

norobro's second reply worked perfectly. I'm doing nonstandard things, i.e., using fvwm to manage my windows and the tcsh shell. So for the record, I did the following:

- in my fvwm startup script, I open all of my terminals using

Code:

xterm ... -e "setenv TEXTWIDTH $TEXTWIDTH; tcsh"

then my macro to call vi says something like

Code:

vi -c":set textwidth=$TEXTWIDTH"

and all works beautifully.

norobro · 05-18-2009, 05:49 PM

You're welcome. I had to experiment a bit to get it to work. Anyway I'm glad that you got it working