In the way you were doing it, the environment variable would be gone when the system() call ended (since it was set only in the subshell). You have (at least) two options: 

ENV{CVSROOT}="...";

[download]
This would also change the environment of your perl program itself, and would hence be propagated to all other child processes; most likely, this is what you want to do in the special case of CVSROOT, isn't it?

The other possibility (assuming that you always shell out to bash, or ksh, or zsh), would go like this: Assume that you want to call an external program myprog with CVSROOT set to a special value, you could use 

system('CVSROOT="...." myprog myarguments');

[download]
This is useful if you want the change of the environment only for that particular call.

-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

In reply to Re: Set shell environment variables from within a perl script by rovf
in thread Set shell environment variables from within a perl script by reluctant_techie

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.