<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> I'm writing my first upstart job to run selenium2 as a service on VMs. This was my first hack: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://paste.ubuntu.com/1003268/">http://paste.ubuntu.com/1003268/</a> It didn't work, and after adding the suggested environment variable lines to debug my environment, I found out it's because the variables aren't expanding as I expected. In the pastebin version, they expand like so: SELENIUM_EXEC='java -jar $SELENIUM_JAR' So, I saw that in some of the examples, variable appear to be escaped by single quotes (like here: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#env">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#env</a>), so I tried, SELENIUM_EXEC="java -jar '$SELENIUM_JAR'" and then my environment output was: SELENIUM_EXEC='java -jar '"'"'$SELENIUM_JAR'"'" #yes, this is a ton of alternating single and double quotes So, I have two questions. Which usage of variables is correct if you are going to expand them? This one: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#env">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#env</a> or this one: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#environment-variables">http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#environment-variables</a> # (scroll to the 'as another example' part.) Second: can someone give me a hint as to how to get variable expansion to work as expected? Thanks! sean </body> </html>