Freebsd Ports – Environmental variables

I'm a big fan of the FreeBSD port system. But the last few weeks
I had problems updating my freebsd ports.

A growing number of ports were giving the following error: "cc: /sbin:/bin:/...:/root/bin: No such file or directory"

A full sample:

libtool: link: cc -shared  .libs/lqr_gradient.o .libs/lqr_rwindow.o .libs/lqr_energy.o .libs/lqr_cursor.o .libs/lqr_carver.o .libs/lqr_carver_list.o .libs/lqr_carver_bias.o .libs/lqr_carver_rigmask.o .libs/lqr_vmap.o .libs/lqr_vmap_list.o .libs/lqr_progress.o   -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib/libglib-2.0.so /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/root/bin /usr/local/lib/libintl.so /usr/local/lib/libiconv.so /usr/local/lib/libpcre.so -lm    -Wl,-soname -Wl,liblqr-1.so.3 -o .libs/liblqr-1.so.3
cc: /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/root/bin: No such file or directory
gmake[2]: *** [liblqr-1.la] Error 1
gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/graphics/liblqr-1/work/liblqr-1-0.4.1/lqr'
gmake[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/graphics/liblqr-1/work/liblqr-1-0.4.1'
gmake: *** [all] Error 2
*** Error code 1

After a lof of debugging and digging deeply in the /work directories of the broken ports. I found out
that libtool was generating a 'wrong' cc command. The part -L /sbin:/bin/usr/bin ... etc was wrong. The path seperator ':' should not be used. I thought libtool was broken. (Rule X pragmatic programmer: "SELECT Isn't broken" ;-) )

After dinging deeply in this script I saw the $path variable was placed in this command...

After typing 'set' to see all environment variables I found out I defined a custom $path variable.
Probably by a typing mistake. Because the real environment variable for path is PATH (uppercase...)

After remove this variable 'path' ("unset path" in bash), all my problems were gone.... Yess !

So some words of wisdom: NEVER define an environment variable 'path' on freebsd !! (And be VERY careful with your other environment variables!)

PHP Extension order and Core Dumps

After updating my FreeBSD port php and apache I suddenly got a whole lot of core dumps. The hosted websites were running fine, but the core dumps didn't feel quite right.. (of course).

Another FreeBSD server of mine, also updated to the same version, didn't have these core dumps.

Doing some research on the web I found that a wrong order in extensions.ini could be a cause of my problems.
Changing the order of the extensions.ini solved my problem!

The following extensions.ini is is working for me:

extension=fileinfo.so extension=filter.so extension=json.so extension=zip.so extension=hash.so extension=pdf.so extension=pgsql.so extension=ctype.so extension=mysql.so extension=mbstring.so extension=gettext.so extension=dba.so extension=sysvshm.so extension=gmp.so extension=pdo.so extension=tidy.so extension=pcntl.so extension=openssl.so extension=readline.so extension=simplexml.so extension=calendar.so extension=posix.so extension=tokenizer.so extension=bz2.so extension=dbase.so extension=xmlwriter.so extension=ldap.so extension=session.so extension=sybase_ct.so extension=exif.so extension=sysvmsg.so extension=mcrypt.so extension=bcmath.so extension=pdo_sqlite.so extension=mssql.so extension=sockets.so extension=zlib.so extension=pcre.so extension=curl.so extension=mhash.so extension=imap.so extension=iconv.so extension=spl.so extension=dom.so extension=pspell.so extension=soap.so extension=xmlreader.so extension=shmop.so extension=sqlite.so extension=xml.so extension=xsl.so extension=mysqli.so extension=wddx.so extension=sysvsem.so extension=ftp.so extension=xmlrpc.so extension=snmp.so extension=ncurses.so extension=odbc.so extension=ming.so extension=gd.so

FreeBSD, (SuSE) Linux date differences

I wanted to retrieve yesterdays date with a format of YYYYMM
This was solved in FreeBSD like this:

date -v-1d  "+%Y%m"

(SuSE) Linux doesn't know the -v option
The same thing in Linux could be done like this:

date -d yesterday "+%Y%m"

Why the difference?