Comment by tptacek

Not at all clear why this is a better setup than a launcher shim that pulls secrets from a secret store and injects them into the environment as the program launches --- which is a pretty normal shape for these things to take.

I guess you could be thinking "subprocess inheritance" as a downside? But subprocesses often need secrets, and if you arrange for that with the filesystem you have the same problem. And, of course, files leak all the time.

More to the point, though: none of this has anything to do with whether you should add secrets to your .bashrc or whatever, which is the argument I'm seeing on the thread.