How to set an Enviroment variable?

[Francisco Borges]

Hello,

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Dario Figueira wrote:
>
>  > the subject says it all, in Windows i know how, My Computer proprieties ->
>  > advanced and it's there
>  > and here? :)
>
>  export abc=xyz

>  To set a variable for a specific program invocation, you can just use:
>
>  # variable=value program
>
>  e.g.:
>
>  # LANG=fr_CA kate
>
>  To set a variable for a user at login, you can use the export command in the
>  ~/.bashrc file.

>From the bash manual:
=========
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a
non-interactive shell with
 the  --login  option, it first reads and executes commands from the
file /etc/profile,
 if that  file  exists.   After  reading  that  file,  it  looks  for
~/.bash_profile,
 ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order,
=========

So as far as I can tell, bash will only read ~/.bashrc when you start
it "interactive non-login", like when you open an x-term, so if the
environment variable is needed for GUI programs which you will start
through your window manager, you should, AFAIK, set the environment
variable in ~/.profile.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-- 
Francisco