Setting up profile

[Timothy Sam]

Hi guys, I thought /etc/profile was the best way to setup environment variables. But when I do this, it seems like that .bash_profile is still the one being used. How can I set environment variables so that it is widely used by any user in the system? Thanks!

[Stefan Wagner]

way 1)

export FOO=bar

way 2)

FOO=bar
export FOO

[Tim Holloway]

There's actually a whole chain of profiles and it varies somewhat between distros. /etc/profile is likely the one you want for global stuff; the .bash_profile in the user's home directory is executed when they login using bash as their initial shell (or "su" a new shell session), so you'd have to replicate things for each user. There's probably a global /etc/bash_profile as well for all bash users.