Installing SoftBench

Setting Up Network-Distributed Operation
Customizing Subprocess Control
Chapter 6 53
Customizing Environment Variables for SoftBench
When one of the SoftBench tools needs to control other processes, such as
SoftBench Builder running make, it can run these processes on a
different host. To do this type of remote processing, your access rights are
checked on the remote system, and your current environment is
transmitted to the remote process.
To check access rights on the remote system:
1. A validation file is created in a directory accessible to both hosts.
2. The user ID of the file owner is obtained and the remote process runs
as this user ID.
3. This user ID is used to obtain initial settings for the HOME and SHELL
environment variables for the remote process. See getpwent(3) for
more information.
When the process is run, the environment of the parent process is
modified before it is inherited by the child. For local processes, the
following procedure is followed:
1. The contents of the file /opt/softbench/config/softenv are read
and each variable found in this file is put into the child environment.
The variables in this file overwrite existing variables with the same
names in the child environment.
2. The environment created by step 1 is further modified by the contents
of your $HOME/.softenv file. As in step 1, a variable in the
$HOME/.softenv file overwrites any existing variable of the same
name.
3. The environment created by steps 1 and/or 2 is further modified by
the contents of your $HOME/.softenv.hostname file. As in the
preceding steps, a variable in the $HOME/.softenv.hostname file
(where hostname is the name of the local system) overwrites any
existing variable of the same name. This file is especially useful if you
have your launch directory mounted on more than one system. You
can create $HOME/.softenv.hostname files to customize the
environment variables used by SoftBench on each system.