Mathematica not seeing my environment/system variables

Question

I'm trying to access my environment variables in Mathematica, but I get a Failed result every time. For example:

$ echo $USER
jlconlin

but in Mathematica I do:

Environment["User"]     
(* $Failed *)

Is there a preference that I need to set? Is my Mathematica installation messed up? Please advise.

Answer 1

Your environment variable is all upper-case!

Environment["USER"]

If you have capitalized your variable correctly and you still don't see it in Mathematica, then this is a problem of your window environment. Mathematica is a graphical program which doesn't get the same environment as you have in a terminal.

First you should try to start Mathematica from the very same terminal that knows about your variable. If this works, then you need to change the environment when you start Mathematica from an icon.

This procedure is different for every operating system. In Linux, you use something like this in your icon launcher:

env WEIRD=1 /usr/local/bin/Mathematica

and you will have WEIRD in your running Mathematica.

In OSX, you use launchctl for this.