environment variable issue

[Michel Leunen]

Hi,

Could someone explain me what I'm doing wrong here? I'm trying to 
retrieve the value of an environment variable in Ubuntu 8.04 like this:

 >>> import os
 >>> os.environ['USER']
'michel'

This works but this doesn't:

 >>> os.environ['HOSTNAME']
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/UserDict.py", line 22, in __getitem__
     raise KeyError(key)
KeyError: 'HOSTNAME'

Why is it working in the first case but not in the second one. I must be 
missing something but it seems I'm not able to figure it out.

Thanks,
Michel

-- 
Michel Leunen
http://linux.leunen.com