Shell out from ruby while setting an environment variable

Question

I need to shell out to a process while setting an environment variable for it. I tried this one-liner:

system \"RBENV_VERSION=system ruby extconf.rb\"
         


        

Answer 1

Actually that worked for me.

shai@comp ~ » irb                                                                                                                                     
1.9.3p0 :001 > system %{SHAIGUITAR=exists ruby -e 'puts ENV["SHAIGUITAR"]'}
exists
 => true 

But if it doesn't, maybe you can try prepending "env" to whatever variable you need. E.g.

system(%{env SHAIGUITAR=exists ruby bla.rb})