Controlling the External Environment Used to Execute Build Commands

When SCons builds a target file, it does not execute the commands with the same external environment that you used to execute SCons. Instead, it uses the dictionary stored in the $ENV construction variable as the external environment for executing commands.

The most important ramification of this behavior is that the PATH environment variable, which controls where the operating system will look for commands and utilities, is not the same as in the external environment from which you called SCons. This means that SCons will not, by default, necessarily find all of the tools that you can execute from the command line.

The default value of the PATH environment variable on a POSIX system is /usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin. The default value of the PATH environment variable on a Win32 system comes from the Windows registry value for the command interpreter. If you want to execute any commands--compilers, linkers, etc.--that are not in these default locations, you need to set the PATH value in the $ENV dictionary in your construction environment.

The simplest way to do this is to initialize explicitly the value when you create the construction environment; this is one way to do that:

    path = ['/usr/local/bin', '/bin', '/usr/bin']
    env = Environment(ENV = {'PATH' : path})
  

Assign a dictionary to the $ENV construction variable in this way completely resets the external environment so that the only variable that will be set when external commands are executed will be the PATH value. If you want to use the rest of the values in $ENV and only set the value of PATH, the most straightforward way is probably:

    env['ENV']['PATH'] = ['/usr/local/bin', '/bin', '/usr/bin']
  

Note that SCons does allow you to define the directories in the PATH in a string, separated by the pathname-separator character for your system (':' on POSIX systems, ';' on Windows):

    env['ENV']['PATH'] = '/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin'
  

But doing so makes your SConscript file less portable, (although in this case that may not be a huge concern since the directories you list are likley system-specific, anyway).

      import os
      env = Environment(ENV = {'PATH' : os.environ['PATH']})
    

      import os
      env = Environment(ENV = os.environ)