Magic environment variables in gnome-terminal

Question

I had installed a proxy software (cntlm) on my machine. It sets the environment variable http_proxy to 127.0.0.1:3128. Now I've uninstalled the program using apt-get remove cntlm.

However I'm able to see the http_proxy variable:

env | grep proxy

Gives me:

http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128/
https_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128/
no_proxy=127.0.0.1, localhost

I've tried doing a recursive grep on ~ and /etc but it doesn't show anything:

grep -ri https_proxy ~
grep -ri https_proxy /etc

The interesting thing is that other terminals such as LXTerminal doesn't have this problem. It only occurs in gnome-terminal.

I've also tried renaming the bash startup script files:

mv .bashrc .bashrc~ 
mv .profile .profile~
mv .bash_profile .bash_profile~

By renaming, the stuff inside these files (and any linked files) won't be sourced. However, this doesn't help either.

How do I go about debugging this problem?

I've already gone through this question and it doesn't help.

Answer 1

Running gsettings reset-recursively org.gnome.system.proxy fixed the problem.

There are two ways to define proxy settings:

1. Manually set the http_proxy environment variable in /etc/environment or your bash profile.
2. Define it in gnome system settings.

I had not set the environment variable manually which is why recursive grep didn't find anything. gnome-terminal was reading gnome system settings and automatically defining the variable.

See this post for more details on various ways of defining proxy settings.