The bottom line is that environmental variables are not supported in the parameters field. They are not expanding to their values.
We agree on this, don't we?
But I don't agree that we should expect from external programs to expand TC's internal variables, even if the programs are written for TC itself.
For any external program which is started from TC there is no difference between TC internal variables
and any other, they can all be expanded if the program does it at all.
Wait a minute. External program doesn't support internal evnvars (ex. %COMMANDER_PATH%).
Are you saying that if such program is started from TC with literal %COMMANDER_PATH% as a parameter send to the program, the program can use its value as parametar, not the literal string?
2solid
Internal environment variables don't exist, at least not in the sense you probably mean. Just test it yourself and launch a CMD from within TC. Does it show variables like %COMMANDER_PATH%? Yes, of course it does, because environment variables are inherited to child processes (by default). So every program launched from/by TC has these variables. You can inspect the environment variables of any process with Process Hacker or Process Explorer and you'll see that any processes which have TC as their parent have these variables set.
And just like the default Windows environment variables (e.g. %SystemRoot%) they can be expanded normally. It's just that the launched program must do so. In other words: If this case wasn't about %COMMANDER_PATH% but %SystemRoot% instead, it would have been the exact same problem because lst2mlt doesn't expand env variables.
I hope that make things a lot clearer.
Regards
Dalai
#101164 Personal licence
Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GiB RAM, ASUS Prime X370-A, Win7 x64
2solid
Yes, that's true. However, there are paths/variables that are not to be expanded. I remember a case where a directory like %AppData% was created, literally. Some case of "virtual apps" (can't remember the exact term) of/for VMware or something. If TC expanded variables regardless, such paths would become inaccessible in the worst case. In other words: buttons would have to provide an option whether or not TC should expand environment variables before running the command.
Regards
Dalai
#101164 Personal licence
Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GiB RAM, ASUS Prime X370-A, Win7 x64