EnvPeek

The question it answers: what environment variables does this environment see?

Two sources, always labelled

• This app: MacPeek’s own environment. A menu-bar app launched from Finder or at login usually sees far fewer variables than your terminal, and EnvPeek says so.
• A process: the environment of one process whose PID you enter (ProcessPeek shows PIDs). macOS allows this only for your own processes, and hides it for protected system binaries. A failed read is reported as a failure, never shown as an empty environment.

The source is shown at the bottom of the screen so a per-process value is never mistaken for a global one.

How to use it

1. Open EnvPeek. Choose This app or A process; for a process, enter its PID and press Inspect.
2. Search names and values, and copy a name, a value or NAME=value.
3. Open PATH, MANPATH and similar variables entry by entry. EnvPeek flags duplicates (only the first can be used), folders that do not exist, relative entries and empty entries (which mean “the current directory”).

Privacy

• Values that look like credentials (names containing TOKEN, SECRET, PASSWORD, API_KEY and similar) are hidden until you press Reveal. That is a convenience heuristic, not a guarantee.
• Values are never logged or written to disk. When you leave the screen they are dropped from memory and anything revealed is hidden again.

Good to know

• EnvPeek does not run your login shell, because that would run your startup files. To see what a terminal sees, inspect that terminal’s shell by PID.
• It shows the environment a process started with, not variables it set later.