On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 12:28:19 UTC, wobbles wrote:
Any solutions that people know of?
You can't from an exe, it is a limitation of the operating system
(same on Linux btw, environment variable inheritance is always
from parent to child, never from child to parent). The reason
batch files can do it is that they don't run in a separate
process, they just run a batch of commands inside the shell
itself.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682009%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
"Altering the environment variables of a child process during
process creation is the only way one process can directly change
the environment variables of another process. A process can never
directly change the environment variables of another process that
is not a child of that process."
If you're an administrator, you could poke the system-wide
variables in the registry and tell the processes to reload them:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682653%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
but of course, changing system-wide registry entries affects way
more than just your parent shell!
If you need to change a parent shell variable, the only way is to
do it from a batch file. You could perhaps run a .bat which sets
the variable and calls your exe to help it do some work.
