Environment variable (NLS_LANG) value altered in Java process?

Posted by Ralkie on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ralkie
Published on 2010-03-16T16:21:56Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 22:31 UTC
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This was noticed in some legacy Java application (jre1.4 on HP-UX).

Parent process (shell script S1) is starting Java process, which on its own is starting child process (shell script S2). Schematically it's: S1 > Java > S2.

NB! Java application connects to Oracle DB using OCI driver.

What is strange here is that process running S1 has environment variable NLS_LANG set to american_america.BLT8MSWIN1257, Java spawns S2 using:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);

and S2 shows that NLS_LANG is set to american_america.UTF8 (!)

This happens on some limited-access environment (production), I was not able to reproduce same problem on linux with jre 1.5.

AFAIK, Java process should inherit environment from its parrent (S1) and should pass all environment variables to its child S2 (since single argument exec call was used). However, it does not seem to be the case. Any ideas why NLS_LANG appears to be altered?

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