EC2 utilities vs. $AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE

Most of the AWS command line tools accept their login credentials from a file named in the AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE environment variable and formatted like so:

AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAEXAMPLE
AWSSecretKey=Base64FlavoredText/Example

The EC2 tools predate this scheme and still refuse to use it, preferring the credentials to be set directly in the environment.  I decided to over-engineer it and pull the EC2 environment variables from the file:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=$(grep '^AWSAccessKeyId' "$AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE" | cut -d= -f2)
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=$(grep '^AWSSecretKey'   "$AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE" | cut -d= -f2)

(Those will probably wrap on blogger; in code, they're two lines, each beginning with "export".)  Now I can put the credentials in one place, and they're available to all of the tools.