Hi Hauke,

Thanks for the feature request, which was straightforward to implement. It has been added to the latest snapshot and will be officially supported with BaseX 12 [1, 2].

Best, Christian

[1] https://files.basex.org/releases/latest/ [2] https://docs.basex.org/12/Process_Functions

On Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 8:41 AM Hauke Brandes hauke.brandes@parsqube.de wrote:

Hello list,

I would like to suggest an enhancement for the proc:system/execute/fork family of functions: it should be possible to control the environment variables of the external process. At the moment, the environment is always inherited from the calling basex process, as far as I can tell.

There are several reasons why it is desirable to control the environment of external processes:

• set variables to values that are not known statically when starting basex
• avoid information leaking (restrict environment to the minimal

required subset)

• control the PATH of the external process

It would be great to have an additional, optional entry in the $options map (maybe named "env" or "environment") that contains a map of environment variables for the external process. If absent, the current behavior (inherited environment) should be used. If the option is given, **only** the environment variables in the map should be used for the external process.

Effectively, the "env"/"environment" option would behave as if it had a default value of `map:merge( available-environment-variables() ! map:entry(., environment-variable(.)) )`

The ProcessBuilder in Java should allow for a straightforward implementation.

What do you think? Cheers, Hauke