Environment Variables?

Hello antihippy,

both questions have been discussed more than a few times in this forum.

Short answers:

% is a valid character for a name and not interpreted in any way. Furthermore, although it's not immediately obvious, environment variables are per user and thus not unambiguous. 

As for exclusions - they are not sine qua non (the MS KB article states that [the recommendations] may help an administrator determine the cause of potential instability), in most cases you won't encounter issues even when none are set.

Christian   

Interesting. I guessed it would be you who would jump in on  this one.  ;)

I am told by the person who I work with that SOPHOS in this environment has had issues when left alone in its default state - problems I've fixed with the SEC aside.

Yes I know that it has been discussed before but it's never very clear what the outcome actually is. You say that "%" is just treated as part of the name. That's chiming with what I've been reading. So for each file I want to exclude I will have to specify the literal paths. I accept that now. Sophos could help everyone out by explicitly stating a best practise in a windows environment. Or could someone just stick something about windows variables somewhere easy to find in the knowledbase or put a sticky up in the forum?

Now you might say "that sounds a little sniffy" but then you're not the guy who's just sat there and told someone else a variation of your comment and had to deal with their [quite loud] reply.

Hello antihippy,

sorry if I've told you what you already know (and which apparently evokes quite loud replies) - wasn't clear (at least to me) from your post. I've simply too many idle cycles at hand when waiting for other work to get finished :smileytongue:.

Agreed, Sophos could explicitly state no variables in a path. A variable might not exist (or have an unexpected value) in the context of the accessing user (and it'd be a challenge to obtain it anyway) and SAVService runs a Local Service ...

Unfortunately while you can export/import exclusions in SEC you can't export them from the local GUI (but perhaps you could generate them from a template?). And you need an additional group/policy for each absolute representation of a logically identical path.

Christian