Re: Trouble setting environment variables

[David Jardine <david@jardine.de>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 06:49:35PM +0300, Jason Filippou wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been trying to set my PATH and CLASSPATH environment variables so that
> they point to my JDK's bin and some Java source files respectively and this
> is what I've written in my .profile file:
> 
> # PATH should also include the latest jdk "bin" directory
> PATH="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.20/bin:$PATH"
> 
>  # set the CLASSPATH variable to include anything I do with java
>  CLASSPATH="/home/jason/code/java:$CLASSPATH"
> 
> Yet I don't seem to have much luck, since "echoing" both environment
> variables gives me the old value of PATH for PATH and nothing for CLASSPATH:
> 
> jason@debian:~$ echo $PATH
> /usr/lib/eclipse6.0/bin/i386_linux:/home/jason/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games
> jason@debian:~$ echo $CLASSPATH
> 
> jason@debian:~$
> 
> This is strange, especially for PATH, because earlier in my .profile I've
> written:
> 
> # set PATH so it includes the eclipse bin directory
>   PATH="/usr/lib/eclipse6.0/bin/i386_linux:$PATH"
> 
> And if you notice the output produced by "echo", this directory is well
> under the scope of PATH.

Perhaps the eclipse directory is added to PATH elsewhere (eg, in 
.profile in your home directory) or there is a separate "export" line 
in /etc/profile.

> 
> What am I doing wrong? Do I need to "export" something?

Certainly.  

export PATH=...
export CLASSPATH=...

> 
> Thanks.

Cheers,
David