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On some workstations (Debian & Ubuntu) and on a server (CentOS) I need environment variables for some scripts and jobs. What I did was altering ~/.profile:

SOMEVARIABLE=/some/custom/path
...

Is this common practice? Are there any side effects I need to know about? Or is this solution fine & stable? Especially on the server I need this to work reliably.

I used ~/.profile because the scripts are always executed via job-specific users without sudo rights - so I thought user-specific environment variables would be appropriate?!

EDIT:

Since the paths differ on the machines and we're talking about more than one or two variables passing the variables as parameters to the scripts wouldn't be a nice solution and hardcoding them into the scrips would require me to update it manually for every machine. That's why I wanted environment variables.

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  • Why not setting those variables directly in the script or giving the parameters as command line options?
    – michas
    Feb 13, 2016 at 12:25
  • Because the paths they model are different on some of the workstations and especially on the server. So I want to read the variables in the script - otherwise I would have to manually put them in the scripts each time I have to change something (for every machine).
    – daniel451
    Feb 13, 2016 at 12:26

1 Answer 1

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It is possible to do so, and I use it to change the default of some programs (usually in form of my default parameters).

For scripts I write I prefer to put the configuration in a separate file ~/.my_program_x.conf and do a . ~/.my_program_x.conf.

In general (AFAIK) scripts prefer to have a configuration file for such cases.

Note: I think you should prefix the variables with export, or some scripts could not see the variable.

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