This is useful for testing commands in isolation.
For example,
$ nix run nixpkgs.geeqie -i -k DISPLAY -k XAUTHORITY -c geeqie
runs geeqie in an empty environment, except for $DISPLAY and
$XAUTHORITY.
E.g.
nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello --greeting Hallo
Note that unlike "nix-shell --command", no quoting of arguments is
necessary.
"-c" (short for "--command") cannot be combined with "--" because they
both consume all remaining arguments. But since installables shouldn't
start with a dash, this is unlikely to cause problems.
Running "nix run" with a diverted store, e.g.
$ nix run --store local?root=/tmp/nix nixpkgs.hello
stopped working when Nix became multithreaded, because
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) doesn't work in multithreaded processes. The
obvious solution is to terminate all other threads first, but 1) there
is no way to terminate Boehm GC marker threads; and 2) it appears that
the kernel has a race where unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) will still fail for
some indeterminate amount of time after joining other threads.
So instead, "nix run" will now exec() a single-threaded helper ("nix
__run_in_chroot") that performs the actual unshare()/chroot()/exec().
On second though this was annoying. E.g. "nix log nixpkgs.hello" would
build/download Hello first, even though the log can be fetched
directly from the binary cache.
May need to revisit this.
So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
This is a convenience command to allow users who are not privileged to
create /nix/store to use Nix with regular binary caches. For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=$HOME/nix/var&real=/$HOME/nix/store" nix run firefox bashInteractive
will download Firefox and bash from cache.nixos.org, then start a
shell in which $HOME/nix/store is mounted on /nix/store.
Jörg Thalheim