modifying os.environ

[Martin von Loewis]

quinn at zloty.ugcs.caltech.edu (Quinn Dunkan) writes:

> Is there any way to delete things from the environment in python?  A
> look at os.py reveals that _Environ only overrides __setitem__ to
> putenv.  So how do you *delete* environment values?  perl does it,
> and a look at the source seems to indicate that it doodles with the
> C environ directly.  So perhaps python needs a delenv _Environ can
> use or something, or implement os.environ in C?

Some systems provide unsetenv(3), but that is not generally available.

> Or perhaps there's a better way to do the (common) thing I'm trying
> to do: clean the environment to insure some minimum sane values.  I
> can't make a copy of the environ and then pass to execve() since
> that doesn't help much for popen and system.

You could implement popen and system yourself, starting from popen2
(for example).

Regards,
Martin