env -0 dump environment. But how to load it?

Question

The linux command line tool env can dump the current environment.

Since there are some special characters I want to use env -0 (end each output line with 0 byte rather than newline).

But how to load this dump again?

Bash Version: 4.2.53

Answer 1

Don't use env; use declare -px, which outputs the values of exported variables in a form that can be re-executed.

$ declare -px > env.sh
$ source env.sh

This also gives you the possibility of saving non-exported variables as well, which env does not have access to: just use declare -p (dropping the -x option).

---

For example, if you wrote foo=$'hello\nworld', env produces the output

foo=hello
world

while declare -px produces the output

declare -x foo="hello
world"

Answer 2

If you want to load the export of env you can use what is described in Set environment variables from file:

env > env_file
set -o allexport
source env_file
set +o allexport

But if you happen to export with -0 it uses (from man env):

-0, --null
end each output line with 0 byte rather than newline

So you can loop through the file using 0 as the character delimiter to mark the end of the line (more description in What does IFS= do in this bash loop: cat file | while IFS= read -r line; do … done):

env -0 > env_file
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' var
do
   export "$var"
done < env_file