Manuals for the command line

Man » env Manual online - detailed online documentation for env man page

🌍
env - run a program in a modified environment

SYNOPSIS

env [OPTION]... [-] [NAME=VALUE]... [COMMAND [ARG]...]

DESCRIPTION

Set each NAME to VALUE in the environment and run COMMAND.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-a, --argv0=ARG
pass ARG as the zeroth argument of COMMAND

-i, --ignore-environment
start with an empty environment

-0, --null
end each output line with NUL, not newline

-u, --unset=NAME
remove variable from the environment

-C, --chdir=DIR
change working directory to DIR

-S, --split-string=S
process  and  split  S into separate arguments; used to pass multiple arguments on shebang
lines

--block-signal[=SIG]
block delivery of SIG signal(s) to COMMAND

--default-signal[=SIG]
reset handling of SIG signal(s) to the default

--ignore-signal[=SIG]
set handling of SIG signal(s) to do nothing

--list-signal-handling
list non default signal handling to stderr

-v, --debug
print verbose information for each processing step

--help display this help and exit

--version
output version information and exit

A mere - implies -i.  If no COMMAND, print the resulting environment.

SIG may be a signal name like 'PIPE', or a signal number like '13'.  Without SIG, all known  signals are included.  Multiple signals can be comma-separated.  An empty SIG argument is a no-op.

Exit status:

125   if the env command itself fails

126   if COMMAND is found but cannot be invoked

127   if COMMAND cannot be found

-      the exit status of COMMAND otherwise

SCRIPT OPTION HANDLING

The -S option allows specifying multiple arguments in a script. Running a script named 1.pl containing the following first line:

#!/usr/bin/env -S perl -w -T
...

Will execute perl -w -T 1.pl

Without the '-S' parameter the script will likely fail with:

/usr/bin/env: 'perl -w -T': No such file or directory

See the full documentation for more details.

NOTES

POSIX's exec(3p) pages says:
"many existing applications wrongly assume that they start with certain signals set to the
default  action  and/or unblocked.... Therefore, it is best not to block or ignore signals
across execs without explicit reason to do so, and especially not to block signals  across
execs of arbitrary (not closely cooperating) programs."

AUTHOR

Written by Richard Mlynarik, David MacKenzie, and Assaf Gordon.

REPORTING BUGS

GNU coreutils online help: [https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/] Report any translation bugs to [https://translationproject.org/team/]

SEE ALSO

sigaction(2), sigprocmask(2), signal(7)

Full documentation [https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/env] or available locally via: info '(coreutils) env invocation'

Packaged by Debian (9.7-3) Copyright © 2025 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later [https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html]. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.