[mpich-discuss] X11 and mpich2 - passing environment variables with a colon in the name

[John Watts]

One of the parallel processes delivers graphical output to an X11 
display.    By default ,when it runs under mpich2, it picks up a DISPLAY 
value of NULL.    If I specify '-env DISPLAY 0.0', sure enough it tries 
to open display '0.0'.    It fails, of course, because X11 DISPLAY 
variables contain a colon (eg :0.0).

So here is the catch:   Colon is a special field-separating character in 
mpiexec argument lists and I cannot figure out how to escape it or to 
pass it across as part of an environment name.    The standard syntax - 
and the resulting error - are::

 >mpiexec -env DISPLAY :0.0 -n4 executable_name
Error: no environment variable after -env option
Unable to parse the mpiexec command arguments.

What's the way around this, please?

-- 

Regards,

John Watts