Question

I have a shell script user.sh that calls an ant script. The ant script prompts for some user input like

<input message="Enter the username" addproperty="my.user" />

I want to set an environment variable USER for the script user.sh from the ant script with the input value entered.
I tried to do it like this:

<property environment = env />
<property name = env.USER value=my.user />

But it is not setting the environment variable in the shell script.
How to set it in the parent shell script which was used to invoke the ant script?

Answer 1

In your case, ant is sub process of shell. It is not possible to set parent process shell’s environment variable from sub process. Other options are .

1. Accept the user input from shell and set the variable.
2. Write the obtained value from ant into a file, and source that file from
   parent shell. (some what like a call back).