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Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:08:48 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: environment variables not propagating when i log in via sshd
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John Owens wrote:

> When I log into a bash shell (as me) remotely through sshd, many variables are
> NOT visible. What's even weirder is that some are and some are not. So for
> instance, "PROCESSOR_LEVEL" and "PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER" and "PATHEXT" are
> visible, but other variables (the ones I define, in general) are not.
> 
> How can I make my system environment variables appear when I ssh through sshd?

I believe this is because the ssh daemon starts out with an empty
environment for the child and then only populates it with a list of
certain known variables.  This is a security measure to prevent data
leaking from the privileged daemon process to the untrused user process.

The solution is to set the variables in the traditional *nix way, by
setting them in the appropriate rc file such as /etc/profile or the
user's ~/.profile.  Ssh also has a mechanism for allowing the connecting
user to specify environment variables to be set; see "man sshd" and "man
sshd_config" for details.

Brian

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