Environment variables must be strings, so use
os.environ[“DEBUSSY”] = “1”
to set the variable DEBUSSY to the string 1.
To access this variable later, simply use:
print(os.environ[“DEBUSSY”])
Child processes automatically inherit the environment variables of the parent process — no special action on your part is required.
You may need to consider some further aspects for code robustness;
when you’re storing an integer-valued variable as an environment variable, try
os.environ[‘DEBUSSY’] = str(myintvariable)
then for retrieval, consider that to avoid errors, you should try
os.environ.get(‘DEBUSSY’, ‘Not Set’)
possibly substitute ‘-1’ for ‘Not Set’
so, to put that all together
myintvariable = 1
os.environ[‘DEBUSSY’] = str(myintvariable)
strauss = int(os.environ.get(‘STRAUSS’, ‘-1’))
# NB KeyError <=> strauss = os.environ[‘STRAUSS’]
debussy = int(os.environ.get(‘DEBUSSY’, ‘-1’))
print “%s %u, %s %u” % (‘Strauss’, strauss, ‘Debussy’, debussy)