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Sometime ago, Sun deprecated the System.getenv() function which, as you might guess, allows you to get the values of environment variables.

Being overly zealous about being cross-platform, they deprecated and disabled it figuring that not all platforms had environment variables, so no platforms in Java would have it.

The bug report on the matter contains this exciting note:

Due to overwhelming demand we are going to reconsider this position for the 1.5 release.

And when the say "overwhelming," they mean it.