0

Why is lets say HOME recognized by all my scripts but my variable DMENU isn't? I export it in my bspwmrc file which is executed at start up.Also had it in my zshrc.

Why do this?

DMENU="-h 27 -z 940 -y 4 -x 210 -i"

I want to have this variable in my scripts so if later I want to change something I don't have to manually change all my scripts.

Could it be that the shebang is #!/bin/sh pointing to dash ? How do i set a global variable then?

Lampros
  • 143
  • 6
  • I think not. The post doesn't specify for `dash` looking at the man page it said to use the `.profile` file in the home directory. I created one and added ` export DMENU="-h 27 -z 900 -y 4 -x 220 -i" ` to it. Running `echo $DMENU ` returns nothing. Is there a dependency to the `.profile` file , an XDG package perhaps,a reboot? – Lampros Jun 06 '21 at 17:45
  • 1
    The linked duplicate covers .profile and applies to all shells, it is in fact a duplicate. – jesse_b Jun 06 '21 at 20:42

1 Answers1

0

Creating a .profile file and exporting my variable there seems to have fixed it. Also bonus for anyone trying something like this, when giving arguments to programs like this make sure to do it like this

dmenu $(echo "$DMENU")

otherwise it doesn't really accept them as arguments.

Lampros
  • 143
  • 6
  • How does "`dmenu $DMENU`" not work? – waltinator Jun 06 '21 at 18:34
  • @waltinator, as `$DMENU` is a scalar variable, not an array, in `zsh`, `rc`, `fish` and other sane shells, `dmenu $DMENU` calls `dmenu` with one argument: the contents of `$DMENU`. If you want to split the contents on space characters, you need `dmenu ${(s[ ])DMENU}` or `dmenu $=DMENU` to split on any `$IFS` character instead of spaces. `dmenu $(echo "$DMENU")` also works as IFS-splitting is done upon command substitution in `zsh`. `dmenu $DMENU` does IFS-splitting in bash/dash and most other Bourne-like shells *but also globbing*, though that's generally seen as a misfeature. – Stéphane Chazelas Jun 07 '21 at 07:29
  • wow thanks, didn't know that! So `dmenu ${(s[,])DMENU}` will set the delimiter as `,` ? Where can i find more documentation on this and the `$=` you mentioned? – Lampros Jun 07 '21 at 14:34