Ubuntu: Up and Running

Other Environment Variables

Ubuntu also provides many other environment variables; some of the more common ones are listed in Table 7-3.

Table 7-3. Common environment variables

Environment variable	Contents
HOME	Your home folder
LANG	The default language
MANPATH	The path to the man program’s manual pages
PATH	The system path
PWD	The current working directory
SHELL	The current shell
TZ	The time zone
USER	Your username

Each variable’s contents can be displayed using the echo command, like this:

echo $HOME

Note

Most commands require you to preface variables with a $ sign to let the operating system know that you are referring to a variable and not just a string of letters.

You can also use environment variables in paths, so you could list the contents of the Documents folder within your home folder using this command:

ls $HOME/Documents

As you can see, $HOME and the ~ operator are interchangeable.