Question

Altering the environment just for a single command is very simple:

DB=postgresql some_command --with --arguments

Unfortunately, I have to do this on a remote server and due to limitations of the deployment, I can only edit what comes after the some_command. The following would be nice, but doesn’t do the trick (in Bash):

some_command --with --arguments DB=postgresql

Is there some other Bash hack to get there?

Answer 1

Here’s another idea, a bit wild I’m afraid:

some_command --do-nothing `DB=postgresql some_command --now-really`

The idea is that the backquoted command will actually do what you want. The first some_command is only there so the command will start as you want it. You should find parameters that would make it do something harmless.

If you have nothing equivalent for the --do-nothing parameter, you can do this:

some_command `DB=postgresql some_command --now-really; ps-grep-kill`

Where ps-grep-kill is a combination of these commands (I leave the details as an exercise), which finds the parent process, which is just about to run some_command, and kills it before it gets a chance to (but after the backquoted some_command has run already).