Why isn't “export” permanently chaning my environment variables?

Question

Running Fedora 20. Trying to permanently set the LANG and LC_TIME variable with "export". When I run it, it works fine and I can see it was changed. When I reboot, it gets changed back. I am doing all this though the bash shell. I have looked in .bash_profile and .bashrc in my home folder and not seeing anything where its getting this wrong value from. I also checked in /etc - the files profile and bashrc, and in /etc/profile.d/. But I cant seem to figure out where its getting that value from.

1) Where is Fedora getting the LANG and LC_TIME env variable from and how does it know which one to pick?

2) How do I change it permanently for a single user?

3) How can I change it globally(for all users) and make it stick?

4) Why does "export" not make it persistent?

I need to be able to do all of this through the shell. Thanks!

Answer 1

In bash, the "export" builtin will export the variable to the shell process's environment. Any processes started from that shell will inherit the process from that shell.

If you want the envvar to be persistent, you must set it in some place that the software started will inherit from. For the locale related vars, use /etc/locale.conf (manpage). For other variables, you will need to find another place. That place will more than likely depend on what you are trying to set the envvars for.

For example, if you want to set a environment variable for a particular systemd service, you need to add an appropriate "Environment" directive to the system unit file. See here and search for "Environment" for more on that topic.