What is the __CHECKFIX1436934 environment variable?

Question

On OS X 10.9.5 my bash shell has the following environment variable set:

__CHECKFIX1436934=1

What is the purpose of this value? I am surprised there is no record of anybody asking this before.

See discussions.apple.com/thread/5559451, no answer there either. Interesting... — nohillside♦, Oct 4 '14 at 20:58
I have __CHECKFIX1436934=1 in my ENV too. I note that the few search results that I find for this include it as part of programmers asking for help and listing their ENV related to the Go language, Python, SublimeText or Brew. I have all of these installed. — Lee Joramo, Oct 8 '14 at 17:04

score 4 · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-11 01:32:06Z

It comes from launch services, specifically this binary

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/LaunchServices

and that environment variable seems to be inherited by many processes, as you can see with ps -Efax

1436934 looks like the number of digits in recent Apple "radar" bug numbers, so perhaps it refers to some value used internally for testing.

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