This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.
Environment variables are made global by exporting them:
MYVAR="hello"
export MYVAR
Once the variable is exported, you can change it's value and do NOT have to export it again. If you need everyone to have a particular variable set, put it in /etc/profile and export it there.
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There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. (Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC)
Thu May 17 00:51:23 2007: 2997 anonymous
you don't know what you're talking about....
Thu May 17 10:00:10 2007: 2998 TonyLawrence
I don't?
:-)
Let me explain where this admittedly rather basic entry originated.
I'd often see people do something like this in scripts or at the command line:
PATH=$PATH:/whatever
export PATH
There's no reason to do the export (PATH is already exported), but there it is.
Sun May 20 01:52:36 2007: 3003 BigDumbDinosaur
you don't know what you're talking about....
This poster must have wandered over from Wikipedia. That place is full of people who think no one else knows what they're talking about.
Tue Feb 9 20:49:47 2010: 8048 anonymous
The explanation on command 'export' makes sense. Thank you.
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