Disclosed is a system, method, and program for accessing variables, such as environment variables, from an operating system. An application program executes a command to store at least one variable maintained by the operating system in a data object accessible to the application program. The application program is executing on the operating system. An operating system command is executed in response to the command from the application program to retrieve the requested at least one variable andn store the retrieved at least one variable in the data object.