[bug?] dotenv command $VARIABLE

[jjangga0214]

Hi, thank you for this convenient cli :)

I found a strange behavior. dotenv does not work with direct use of an environment variable.

Let's say my .env file is like the below.

# content of .env
MESSAGE=helloworld

I expect the command below would print "helloworld" on the console.

$ dotenv echo $MESSAGE

However, it doesn't. If an environment variable is directly used on the command after dotenv, then the value is not properly populated.

So, assume I made a file greeting.sh like this.

# content of greeting.sh
echo $MESSAGE

And I changed the command like the below.

$ dotenv ./greeting.sh

And now it works!

This might be quite unexpected to users, isn't it?
I think it'd be better to allow direct use of environment variables after dotenv.
How do you feel?

Thanks.

[entropitor]

Hey! Thanks for the bug report. The problem is with the way the shell works. If you run

$ dotenv echo $MESSAGE

your shell will first interpolate the value $MESSAGE and then run the command with the value interpolated

$ dotenv echo ""

so dotenv-cli will get the arguments echo "" so it's impossible to know that $MESSAGE was passed.

What you could do: launch a bash shell with the command "echo $MESSAGE". For this to work, you need to escape the $ or use single quotes

$ dotenv -- bash -c "echo \$MESSAGE"
$ dotenv -- bash -c 'echo $MESSAGE'

I hope this helps