process.env variable leading '=' truncated

[jcblw]

• Version: 6.0.0
• Platform: 15.0.0 Darwin RELEASE_X86_64
• Subsystem: process

Hello

I just recently got a ticket filed on a npm module, dotenv, I help maintain. It has to do with a "=" being at the front of an environment variable. While investigating I noticed our parser was picking up on this character fine, but when trying to use dotenv's preload option the tests started failing. After seeing those test I tried to just load the env directly into node.

TEST='=FOO' node -e 'console.log(process.env.TEST)'
TEST==FOO node -e 'console.log(process.env.TEST)'
TEST="=FOO" node -e 'console.log(process.env.TEST)'

All of these commands output FOO to the console with no equal sign. Looking at the test node has been doing this for a few versions. Is this intended behavior?

[addaleax]

See also: nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8467

This seems to be the result of an OS X/BSD implementation detail, and apparently stripping the leading = occurs when setting the variable, not in Node.js. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done against this.

[Fishrock123]

Works for me under OS X 10.10.5 and bash 3.2.

$ TEST='=foo' node -p process.env.TEST
> =foo

@jcblw What shell are you using?

[S-YOU]

just fyi, my zsh also same result as him, node 6.1, osx mavericks, but osx bash, and linux zsh seems ok.

[jcblw]

@Fishrock123 I am using ZSH. I did login with bash and the leading = is retained. Sorry for not investigating this more. This does seems to be an issue with running node while using ZSH. Closing.

Thanks for the help!