66

In bash, I can do EDITOR=vim crontab -e. Can I get similar effect in Fish shell?

5 Answers 5

35
begin; set -lx EDITOR vim; crontab -e; end
5
  • 5
    is there any easier way to do this? Oct 29, 2012 at 8:43
  • oddly, this doesn't work for me. I'm calling a ruby script, and ENV doesn't pick up the variable I'm setting: set -lx date '12/04/2012'
    – Duke
    Dec 7, 2012 at 23:13
  • @Duke: It works for me. begin; set -lx date '12/04/2012'; ruby -e 'puts ENV["date"]'; end Dec 8, 2012 at 0:49
  • 11
    In the meanwhile this has been answered in the Fish FAQ: fishshell.com/docs/current/faq.html#faq-single-env
    – harm
    Apr 3, 2014 at 9:09
  • 4
    And what that FAQ says is this: env SOME_VAR=1 command Jun 5, 2018 at 20:54
92

Don't see why this shouldn't work: env EDITOR=vim crontab -e
That bypasses the shell completely.

3
  • 4
    This is so much easier. The only problem is that bypassing the shell disallows any custom fish commands, which are probably locked in your muscle memory.
    – TerraMetta
    Jun 3, 2013 at 20:11
  • 1
    I saw that in the docs too, but then why doesn't the following work? env SOME_VAR=1 echo $SOME_VAR Nov 1, 2017 at 22:50
  • 1
    never mind, i should have just looked it up: stackoverflow.com/questions/10938483/… Nov 1, 2017 at 22:57
15

That is from the Documentation

SOME_VAR=1 command produces an error: Unknown command "SOME_VAR=1".

Use the env command.

env SOME_VAR=1 command

You can also declare a local variable in a block and that would not bypass the shell

begin
  set -lx SOME_VAR 1
  command
end
6

Starting version 3.1, you can use the same syntax used in bash (EDITOR=vim crontab -e).

PR introducing the feature: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/6287

2

depending on a definition of be function, this can fail

begin
  set -lx RAILS_ENV staging
  be rails r "p ENV['RAILS_ENV']"
end

In order for it to work:

function be --description 'Runs bundle exec' --no-scope-shadowing
  bundle exec $argv
end

Please, see the explanation of --no-scope-shadowing option

-S or --no-scope-shadowing allows the function to access the variables of calling functions. Normally, any variables inside the function that have the same name as variables from the calling function are "shadowed", and their contents is independent of the calling function.

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