Knowing the default environment

Setting up a proper environment is very important for running a process. An environment consists of environment variables that may or may not have a default value set. The required environment is set by modifying the existing environment variables or creating new environment variables. Environment variables are exported variables that are available to the current process and also its child processes. In Chapter 1, The Beginning of the Scripting Journey, we learned about some of the builtin shell variables that can be used in our application as environment variables to set the environment.

Viewing a shell environment

To view the current environment in the shell, we can use the printenv or env commands. Environment variables may have no value, a single value, or a multiple value set. If multiple values exist, each value is separated by a colon (:).

printenv

We can use printenv to print the value associated with a given environment variable. The syntax is as follows...