# "system" users' environmental variables



## mamalos (Mar 20, 2011)

Hi everybody.

I've been using FreeBSD for many years now, and since almost the start I had this question, that never bothered me soooo much so as to have to resolve it:

Is there a specific way (conventional I mean) to set environmental variables for daemon-users? If so, how do we know if it is honored by a specific user? The only "trick" I remember having used so far was to edit the daemon's related */usr/local/etc/rc.d/daemon* script, and to be honest I think it didn't work .

Thank you all for your time in advance,

mamalos


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## wblock@ (Mar 20, 2011)

Could you give a example?  Some values can be set through _flags variables in /etc/rc.conf, but that might not be what you are asking.


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## dandelion (Mar 20, 2011)

rc.conf is sourced by /etc/rc.subr, you can inject code that exports environment variables for all or a specific rc.d script.

An example for net-p2p/transmission-daemon:

```
transmission_enable=YES

# hide tracker requests but not actual p2p traffic behind privoxy+tor
case [highlight]$name[/highlight] in
    transmission) export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118
    ;;
esac
```
By the time load_rc_config reads /etc/rc.conf variable $name contains the name of the rc.d script.


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## mamalos (Mar 20, 2011)

Thank you both guys,

dandelion I think that your solution is what I need. I will just rephrase it to see that I have understood it correctly: I can write whatever */bin/sh* code in */etc/rc.conf* and */etc/rc.subr* will run it. That's great! Where can I see more info regarding this procedure? The porter's handbook?

thanx again.


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