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11 – The Environment
As we discussed earlier, the shell maintains a body of information during our shell ses- sion called the environment. Data stored in the environment is used by programs to deter- mine facts about the system's configuration. While most programs use configuration files to store program settings, some programs will also look for values stored in the environ- ment 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