[wplug] Managing Environment Variables - Follow-up

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 02:54:50PM -0500, Weber, Lawrence A wrote:
> I discovered
> that even if I removed the environment variables from my .bashrc file
> that the variables still had valid values when I exited and re-entered a
> new terminal.  I search all files in my home directory and in /etc but
> could not find a source for the variables.  I could change their values
> but when I re-entered a terminal, they had the old values.  I checked to
> confirm that .bash_profile has never been changed. 

If you just exited your terminal windows and didn't log out
completely, I am not surprised that the variables were still set.

When you log in, either at the text console or in a graphical
environment, your session is started by a shell.  In a graphical
environment, that shell simply runs a script that starts up
Gnome/KDE/whatever.  The login shell read in your .bashrc when it
starts up and continues to have those variables set until the session
closes. 
Your login shell's environment is exported to all subshells it
starts. 


-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>