Normally Argylls tools expect that they are directly interacting with a user, and use a couple of techniques for communicating with them through the command line. One is to output progress information by re-writing the same display line by using a Carriage Return rather than a Line Feed at the end of each line. Another is to allow a single key stroke to trigger an action or interrupt operations.

If the ARGYLL_NOT_INTERACTIVE environment variable is set, then:

    A Line Feed will be added to the end of each progress line.

    Any time it would wait for a single keystroke input, it will instead wait for and read the next character from stdin.
    To facilitate flushing stdin, any return or line feed characters will be ignored, so a character other than return or line feed must be used to trigger activity.

    Note that while a reading is being made, a character input can abort the reading, just as with normal interactive mode.

Both of these can be used to set a default CCMX or CCSS colorimeter calibration file, equivalent to supplying a -X argument to spotread, dispcal, dispread and any other utility that allows using a colorimteter. The ARGYLL_COLMTER_CAL_SPEC_SET will take priority if both are set.

Normally a delay of 200 msec is allowed between changing a patch color on a display, and reading the color with an instrument, although some instruments (ie. i1d3) will automatically measure and set an appropriate delay during instrument calibration. In rare situations this delay may not be sufficient (ie. some TV's with extensive image processing features turned on), and a larger delay can be set using the ARGYLL_MIN_DISPLAY_UPDATE_DELAY_MS environment variable, ie. ARGYLL_MIN_DISPLAY_UPDATE_DELAY_MS=400 would set a 400 msec minimum delay.

On an X11 system, if this is set (ie. set it to "yes"), then the presence of the XRandR 1.2 extension will be ignored, and other extensions such as Xinerama and XF86VidMode extension will be used. This may be a way to work around buggy XRandR 1.2 implementations.

There is now partial support for the Eye-One Pro Rev E (aka Eye-One Pro 2) instrument, but a Rev E can be operated in legacy mode if the environment variable ARGYLL_DISABLE_I1PRO2_DRIVER is set (ie. set it to "yes").

Argyll tries to follow the XDG Base Directory Specification, and uses the XDG_CACHE_HOME environment variable to place per instrument calibration information (Eye-One Pro and ColorMunki instruments).

On Unix type operating systems, configuration and profiles for displays are placed relative to these environment variables.