On Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:43:26 +0100, Sietse Brouwer wrote:

...

it seems that Ctx [re]defines the system variable HOME on its run;

This is not an answer, but a guess: Could it be that your interactive shell uses one setting, and the non-interactive shell uses another?

I'm using the windows default shell - cmd.exe; it is interactive in the manner that you can type a command on the command prompt and the command (or a program) is executed. In Windows, when a process is created, it inherits current system variables. If you launch a program from cmd.exe (= command line), the program (process) inherits all system variables existing in the moment of launching in the environment of the session of that cmd.exe. (Various instances of cmd.exe don't inter-corporate in the point-of-view of system variables.) Moreover, when the launched program changes a system variable, it changes it just in its-own scope; so values of system variables of the calling cmd.exe are not affected. BTW: I solved the problem a bit "hacky" (and hopefully temporarily, if we'll find a better solution): I'm calling "SET HOME.ORG=%HOME%" right before I launch context.exe; so I can access my previous variable value. Somewhere inside a Ctx source within a Lua scope I call: ---- local home = os.getenv("HOME.ORG") or os.getenv("HOME") or "MyUsualHomePath" ---- It works but it is not "nice" enough. Best regards, Lukas

I'm only guessing here, I don't know much about Windows administration; I just remember being driven to despair by a similar 'these settings are not used if the shell is not interactive' problem under Linux.

--Sietse

Hello, I can answer just the first point - On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 00:15:17 +0100, Sietse Brouwer wrote:

Lukáš wrote:

...

it seems that Ctx [re]defines the system variable HOME on its run

Did some digging, and indeed it does. This is what happens, if I read the code correctly (lines 11681-11696 of context/bin/mtxrun): * `homedir` is read from the environment variable USERPROFILE on Windows, and from HOME on Linux. * both USERPROFILE and HOME (and environment.homedir) are then set to the value of `homedir`.

Questions this raises:

(1) Windows does not seem to use HOME

That's true, that's why I decided to use a variable of this name.

(it's not in any of the lists of environment variables that I found), only HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH, so what do you use it for?

That's true, too. The HOMEPATH variable points to "c:/Document and Settings/blablabla" - I didn't want to change this variable to "my" value "d:/Lukas" as many programs may suppose location "c:/Document and Settings" and don't need to use "%HOMEPATH%" when they want to obtain the directory of user settings/data. So, if possible (= when I CAN AFFECT some program behavior; like Ctx, gnuplot and other command-line oriented programs) I'm using "my" variable HOME. Also, I redirected "My Documents" folder (under Windows) to "d:/Lukas". Surprisingly, when you do this redirection (via "My Documents" properties - "Change Location" or similar button), "My Documents" location is changed but HOMEPATH variable keeps its default settings, "c:/Documents and Settings/...". So the state of user documents folder is a bit "schizophrenic" from this moment as "My Documets" are redirected to "d:/Lukas" whilst HOMEPATH points to "c:/Documents and Settings/...". As "My Documents" location is not detectable from the command line (supposing you don't use a tool which reads a key in the registry which contains the value of "My Documents" location), I defined (on all computers, notebooks etc. I'm working with) a new system [local] variable "HOME" which points to the same dir as "My Documents" and which was not in use by Windows. There was no name HOME collision problem so far - so I choose this name. Best regards, Lukas -- Ing. Lukáš Procházka [mailto:LPr@pontex.cz] Pontex s. r. o. [mailto:pontex@pontex.cz] [http://www.pontex.cz] Bezová 1658 147 14 Praha 4 Tel: +420 244 062 238 Fax: +420 244 461 038

normally you can better look in a lua file in the tex/context/source path as that is the real source .. mtxrun is just a merge

So noted at http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mtxrun (where there is also the argument reference of each subscript, and space for people to document them further, by the way). --Sietse On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

On 11/5/2012 12:15 AM, Sietse Brouwer wrote:

...

(2) why would mtxrun set the variables and risk overwriting something? The comments suggest it is for the benefit of the cnf files, but still --- why overwrite? ossetenv("HOME", homedir) -- can be used in unix cnf files ossetenv("USERPROFILE",homedir) -- can be used in windows cnf files

it just sets them local (for this run + subruns)

they are set just in case one has cross platform scripts (like me)

...

Below: relevant code from mtxrun, lines 11681-11696

normally you can better look in a lua file in the tex/context/source path as that is the real source .. mtxrun is just a merge

Hans

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