How to Set Environment Variables in Linux

You can put the export statement such as

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.8.0_11

into

/etc/profile File for Linux system wide environment

~/.bash_profile ($HOME/.bash_profile) or ~/.prfile file For only this account's environment.

The above only runs for login shell. If you wanted to make large changes or application specific changes, you can try putting a script to gather the variables in /etc/profile.d/

Example:

/etc/profile.d/java.sh

$ cat java.sh

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.8.0_11

/etc/profile does a call that will run any script in /etc/profile.d/, and this applies to all users on the system including root.

If you want to load the environment variables within java.sh without having to restart the machine, you can use the source command as in:

$> source java.sh

Check to make sure it works

echo $JAVA_HOME

And you can use

$ set

to display current environment.