Not able to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for Java process

Question

I am trying to call my linux executable from shell script. Before calling this executable, I want to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH with specific values. My shell script is as below:

Answer 1

Are you sure the subprocess is using csh? If it starts up using bash or something else then this would prevent the script from working (but not to throw an IOException).

You should really aad a hashbang line as the very first line of your script to state which shell interpreter you wish to use.

eg.

#!/usr/bin/env csh

Answer 2

Dunes answer solves your problem, but I would strongly suggest a different approach in this particular case. Instead of relying on a shell to set the environment arguments, you should do this in your Java code. This way you don't need to know which shells exist on the system and what their language is, it will just work on all platforms.

To do this, you can use the Runtime.exec(String[] cmd, String[] environment) overload (javadoc). As the second parameter you can pass an array which contains all the environment variables the subprocess will see.

A little bit nicer even is the ProcessBuilder API:

ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("executable.so");
Map<String, String> env = pb.environment();
env.put("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "/proj/something");
Process javap = pb.start();
javap.waitFor();

This way, the subprocess will inherit all environment variables from the Java process, and additionally have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable set.