Windows - std.process - Setting env variables from D

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 12:28:19 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> Any solutions that people know of?

You can't from an exe, it is a limitation of the operating system 
(same on Linux btw, environment variable inheritance is always 
from parent to child, never from child to parent). The reason 
batch files can do it is that they don't run in a separate 
process, they just run a batch of commands inside the shell 
itself.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682009%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

"Altering the environment variables of a child process during 
process creation is the only way one process can directly change 
the environment variables of another process. A process can never 
directly change the environment variables of another process that 
is not a child of that process."

If you're an administrator, you could poke the system-wide 
variables in the registry and tell the processes to reload them: 
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682653%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

but of course, changing system-wide registry entries affects way 
more than just your parent shell!



If you need to change a parent shell variable, the only way is to 
do it from a batch file. You could perhaps run a .bat which sets 
the variable and calls your exe to help it do some work.