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Hi,

I like your function in https://github.com/philjackson/philjackson.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2021-07-26-export-an-environment-variable-to-emacs.md, but had a small issue with this:

$ export ASHTAS='abc " def""'
$ emacs-export ASHTAS
*ERROR*: End of file during parsing

and in emacs M-: (getenv "ASHTAS") returns nil.

It can also trigger execution of elisp code embedded in the environment variable and substitution of environment variables, at least, I was able to do this:

$ export ASHTAS='abc$PWD" (message "hello"));"'
$ emacs-export ASHTAS
$

then emacs displays "hello" in the echo area and in emacs M-: (getenv "ASHTAS") returns "abc/home/philjackson" (assuming your M-: default-directory is "/home/philjackson")

I fixed the function as follows to translate " to the octal escape sequence before sending the string

function export-emacs {
    if [ "$(emacsclient -e t)" != 't' ]; then
        return 1
    fi

    for name in "${@}"; do
        value=$(eval echo \"\${${name}//\\\"/\\\\042}\")
        emacsclient -e "(setenv \"${name}\" \"${value}\")" >/dev/null
    done
}

Now M-: (let ((x (getenv "ASHTAS"))) (list x (length x))) returns ("abc \" def\"\"" 11) as expected.

Thank you for sharing your snippet! I would not have thought of writing it myself, but when I adopted it, I wanted to make it more robust. HTH!