One of the special environment variables that is used to control the way your system behaves is the ENV variable which acts as a pointer to the .bashrc file. This variable must be stored in the .bash_profile file to inform the system that the .bashrc file exists and is to be read when creating a Bash shell.

To set the ENV variable, or any other environment variable, use the env command.

Note: The ENV variable has no meaning outside of the Bash shell.

Command Format

ENV=$HOME / filename;export ENV

Example

This example sets the environment variable to point to the .bashrc file in the $HOME directory ($HOME is a variable that is defined by the system to be the absolute path of the users login directory).

$ ENV=$HOME/.bashrc; export ENV