Chapter 11. The Environment

As we discussed earlier, the shell maintains a body of information during our shell session called the environment. Data stored in the environment is used by programs to determine facts about our configuration. While most programs use configuration files to store program settings, some programs will also look for values stored in the environment to adjust their behavior. Knowing this, we can use the environment to customize our shell experience.

In this chapter, we will work with the following commands:

  • printenv—Print part or all of the environment.

  • set—Set shell options.

  • export—Export environment to subsequently executed programs.

  • alias—Create an alias for a command.

What Is Stored in the Environment?

The shell stores two ...

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