How to modify the environment of a running process in a desktop or server environment

If your environment initialization files are incorrect, your environment can become misconfigured. In such cases, how can you fix the environment of an existing process—especially one that doesn’t have a typical interface, like a shell process, for manual changes? A GDB script can help you.

Let’s walk through how to manipulate the PATH environment variable of an existing process. Consider a scenario where a process is created using the following script:,

Run it and get its output flushing,

So how can we fix it on the fly? Let’s write a gdb script like this,

run it at another terminal,

check the output from the user’s script terminal,

Cheers, the broken environment was fixed.