It's not exactly clear what you mean, so this might be totally off the mark.

You can "freeze" an environment using a Perl script which could be as simple as this trivial example "freeze": 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my $freezer = "frozen.env";

open (FROZEN, ">$freezer")
  || die "Could not write to $freezer\n";

foreach (keys %ENV)
{
     print FROZEN "$_=$ENV{$_}\n";
}

close (FROZEN);

[download]
Now you can reinstate it using something like this program, which might be called "perform": 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my $freezer = "frozen.env";

open (FROZEN, $freezer)
  ||  die "Could not read saved environment $freezer\n";
while (<FROZEN>)
{
     chomp;
     my ($var, $value) = /^([^=]+)=(.*)/;
     $ENV{$var} = $value;
}
close (FROZEN);

system (@ARGV);

[download]
Once you have established your environment, you would run the first program to "freeze" it. This would churn out a file called "frozen.env" which lists your various environment variables. Note that this program is not very robust, and multi-line entries are going to break it, so you may have to modify it accordingly.

Once you have established your environment, you can use the second program to execute a command in that pre-defined environment, such as:
% perform make
Now, you can use a "dot config" file by replacing the value of $freezer with, perhaps, something like this:
my $freezer = (getpwuid($>))[7]."/.frozenrc";
Note that the getpwuid call returns the home directory for the current user, as defined in /etc/passwd, so this will likely not work in a Win32 environment.

If your make process outputs errors to STDERR, you may have to write a shell script wrapper which can trap these accordingly, or attempt the same with a more ambitious script. I don't have an example of that handy, though. SuperSearch may yield results.

In reply to Re: Sourcing Dot Config Files and Monitoring Make Processes by tadman
in thread Sourcing Dot Config Files and Monitoring Make Processes by hackdaddy

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