Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide

Adding or changing environment variables

After you've poked around in your environment variables, you might determine that you want to set one that's currently not available or change one to make it better meet your needs. In general, you won't randomly specify environment variables; you'll do it because a certain program requires a specific variable in order to run.

Environment variables you can mess with The following table includes environment variables you can safely change. Keep in mind that the shell itself might not use a specific variable, like NNTPSERVER, while programs running under the shell might. Sometimes shells assign default variables, while in other cases, you'll have to manually set the value. Bash and ksh csh Description CDPATH ...