How to run a script with a temporary environment variable?

Question

If I have a python scripts with simple lines as the following:

import os

name = os.environ.get('BEAR_NAME')
if name != "":
  print("hello, ", name)

I'd like to set a temporary environment variable when running this script. Note that if I do

export BEAR_NAME="sleepybear"
python hello.py

the env var BEAR_NAME will still have value sleepybear once the python program finishes, which is not desired. Take docker's example, we can do docker run -e SOME_VAR=SOME_VAL to set the environment variable SOME_VAR. Is there a similar way when running a python script?

Answer 1

Your shell command can be

BEAR_NAME="sleepybear" python hello.py