I'll agree with with the kludgy judgement.  The best solution would be to get the Integration tests out of the unit tests and then run in their own properly set up environment.

Please also note, this in not only kludgy, but it is a hack.  dotted environment variables are not officially supported in unix.  The discussions that I've read say that this restriction is silly as there is no reason to not support them.  It turns out that the writers of 'env' decided not to honor the arbitrary restriction, and fully support nearly any character as legitimate.  The shells just don't notice.