[Tutor] accessing another system's environment

[David]

On 26 February 2011 22:42, Walter Prins <wprins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26 February 2011 04:26, Bill Allen <wallenpb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I administrate the workstations in our engineering environment and some of
>> the major pieces of software we use are configured via the Windows system
>> environment variables.  Being able to reach out to a PC and check or change
>> those is handy, even important, in my situation.   I am trying to explore
>> the possibility of managing these from a system I am using in a platform
>> independent way and figure that I ought to be able to do this with Python.
>> Perhaps there are third party Python modules I need to help accomplish this?
>
> Are you intending changing *running processes* environment variables, or
> merely update a given PC's configuration so that next time an app starts
> they'll see the new settings?  (I'd guess the latter as even Windows itself
> won't e.g. update running instances of cmd.exe's environment when you change
> them after an instance of cmd.exe has started.)

Indeed. "check" is easy by my method. "change" is harder.
I can only guess this would involve somehow editing the windows registry.
I have nothing to offer on that topic.