Creating Env variable

[hyousef (Hasan Yousef)]

At my Windows 11 machine, trying to check if the env variable “” exists or no, if yes, I need to read its value, if not there I need to set it, so I wrote the below code:

	tmpDir, exists := os.LookupEnv("keyTemp")
	fmt.Println("keyTemp: ", exists)
	fmt.Println("tmpDir: ", tmpDir)
	if !exists {
		tmpDir = os.TempDir() + "\\fitz"
		fmt.Println("tmpDir: ", tmpDir)
		err = os.Setenv("keyTemp", tmpDir)
		if err != nil {
			panic(err)
		}
	}

But always (after rerunning the binary) I’m getting the “exists” value as false and my env variable is never created!

[hyousef (Hasan Yousef)]

It looks no direct way at go lang itself, so the option is to use cmd, so it worked with me as:

tmpDir = os.TempDir() + "\\fitz"
// err = os.Setenv("keyTemp", tmpDir)
err = exec.Command(`SETX`, `keyTemp`, tmpDir).Run()
if err != nil {
	fmt.Printf("Error: %s\n", err)
}

[NobbZ (Norbert Melzer)]

“created” in what sense?

Environment variables set by a process are only visible to a process and it’s children, not to siblings or parents.

[Massimo.Costa]

Usually environment variables created by a process are visible only by the process itself and its children.
In this case it’s normal you can’t see the variable that your program creates

[j-forster (Johann Forster)]

Your code is fine. The SETX command is the only way to create system environment values.