NAME

environ − user environment

HP-UX COMPATIBILITY

Level: HP-UX/NUCLEUS

Origin: System III

DESCRIPTION

An array of strings called the “environment” is made available by exec(2) when a process begins. By convention, these strings have the form “name=value”. The following names are used by various commands:

PATH The sequence of directory prefixes that sh(1), time(1), nice(1), nohup(1), etc., apply in searching for a file known by an incomplete path name. The prefixes are separated by colons (:). Login(1) sets PATH=:/bin:/usr/bin. 

HOME Name of the user’s login directory, set by login(1) from the password file passwd(5).

TERM The kind of terminal for which output is to be prepared.  This information is used by commands (such as mm(1) or vi(1)) that are able to exploit special capabilities of that terminal.

TZ Time zone information. The minimum format is tznamediff where tzname is an “alphabetic” string giving the time zone name or abbreviation, and diff is the (positive or negative, and possibly fractional) difference in hours from GMT.  NOTE: west is positive, east is negative.  If a summer time zone adjustment (such as Daylight Savings in the US) is to be applied the format is tznamediffdstzname where dstzname is the name of the “Daylight Savings” time zone. 

LANG Language selection. This is one of the names listed in langid(7). It is used to select the character set, lexical order, up and down shift tables, and other information which varies from one area to another.

Further names may be placed in the environment by the export command and “name=value” arguments in sh(1), by the setenv command in csh(1), by the env(1) command, or by exec(2). It is unwise to conflict with certain shell variables that are frequently exported by .profile files: MAIL, PS1, PS2, IFS. 

SEE ALSO

env(1), login(1), sh(1), exec(2), ctime(3C), getenv(3C), profile(5), tztab(5), hpnls(7), term(7). 

Hewlett-Packard  —  last mod. May 11, 2021