Question

I’m using virtualenv (which sets some environment variables). Now, I want to spawn a new terminal window that have the same environment. If I try:

xterm &

I get a new terminal but the environment is the default environment, that is when I enter the following line on the new terminal:

pserve --reload development.ini

I get:

>> pserve: Command not found.

On the other hand, if I execute:

xterm -e pserve --reload development.ini &

It opens a new terminal that runs pserve. So, my questions are:

1. How to generally open a new terminal with the same environment
2. How can the new terminal find pserve when I run it with -e switch?

Answer 1

To answer your first question, a quick and dirty way of doing it is to use the sh builtin ‘set’ command (more see ‘help set’).

From the old shell:

set > ~/env.tmp

Then

xterm &

From the new shell:

. ~/env.tmp && rm ~/env.tmp

You may want to wrap this up in a script or add a couple of functions in your ‘bash.rc’. You may also want to use ‘mktemp(1)’ or similar.