Environment for specific application

Question

Is it possible to specify environment variables for a given application only? So that environment variables are set automatically when the application starts ('VAR=VALUE myapp' is not what I want).

The actual problem is, I want wine to always start with a specific LC_ALL setting, but don't want to change LC_ALL globally. There're lots of places that could start wine (terminal, gnome file associations, menu shortcuts), and manually setting LC_ALL in all of these seems too tedious.

Answer 1

Another possibility is to change your PATH so that, e.g., /usr/local/bin comes first and then create a /usr/local/bin/wine like so:

 #!/bin/sh

 export FOO=bar

 /usr/local/bin/wine "$@"

I don't know how these "gnome file associations" and "menu shortcuts" work. If they hardcode the full path rather than relying on $PATH this soln won't work.

Answer 2

You could do something like this:

Rename the main wine binary from wine to wine.real. Create a script in place of the wine binary that looks something like this.

#!/bin/bash
FOO=bar
export foo
wine.real $* &

Answer 3

You could also make an alias so you don't need to change something that your software manager manages. E.g., in your ~/.bash_profile

 alias wine='FOO=bar; \wine'

The \ prevents supresses alias expansion to prevent infinite recursion.

Edit: this solution won't work in all the situations you mention.