OK, you have 2 scripts in your example. The first demonstrates that your ENV is what you desire. My question was, are you running that test script from the command line? I assume you are running the latter script from within a web server. When the web server runs a script it does so from within the context of the web server. This context is usually done with the environment of the web server, using the web server' user name. This may not be what you expect.