I need to set some system wide environment variables (i.e., JAVA_HOME, etc) and was wondering if it is more appropriate to set them in:

/etc/profile (where I have them now)

vs.

/etc/bash.bashrc

or.

neither???

Thanks!

I believe that environment variables get set in a login shell script (/etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile) rather than one that gets executed for each terminal session (/etc/bash.bashrc or ~/.bashrc).

I do want the variables set for each terminal session, so /ect/profile seems to do the trick. Just wondering if that is standard pratice..?

{ Note: liquigel ==> johnMG }

Sorry if I was unclear jbrashear. What I was getting at was: since environment variables are passed on to subshells, I figured that you generally set up environment variables in either /etc/profile (for system-wide environment variables), or in ~/.bash_profile (for a given user's environment variables).

I think it's conventional to use /etc/bash.bashrc and ~/.bashrc for stuff like aliases, which do *not* get passed on to subshells.

It would be nice if the ones located in /etc had some commenting in them describing this.