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I am working on a remote server through putty and am trying to set certain environment variables throught something like this

#!/bin/bash
VAR="SOME VALUE"
export $VAR

when I exit the script and run echo on $VAR, I am given a blank line. could you please suggest a way around this.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
10

First you need to export VAR, rather than $VAR.

Plus, I think, you are trying to execute the script from your shell as 

./initVars.sh # or whatever is your script name...

You should rather source it as

source ./initVars.sh # OR
. ./initVars.sh # Note the leading '.' which serves as short-hand for source.

You can put it in your .bashrc.

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2 Comments

can u tell me how to do the same in windows batch file
For batch file, i think that you can simply call the .bat file from parent file, as "initVars.bat". Make sure that it does not have any exit statement. Plus, to set a var, you need to use the command "set", like set VAR="SOME VALUE"
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It should be

export VAR

Note the lack of the dollar sign symbol.

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2 Comments

Are you running bash? Try this: echo $0 from the command prompt. If you don't see bash or sh, then it won't work.
@HaiVu It won't work for the reason in anishane's answer. export is POSIX, so it should work in sh as well.
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Two problems. First, it's just export VAR. Second, $VAR will only be available to your script and child processes, not to the parent shell. You can source it like . ./yourscript.sh from the shell if you want $VAR to be set for that shell.

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