shellscriptingenvironment-variables

Global environment variables in a shell script

How to set a global environment variable in a bash script?

If I do stuff like

#!/bin/bash
FOO=bar

...or

#!/bin/bash
export FOO=bar

...the vars seem to stay in the local context, whereas I'd like to keep using them after the script has finished executing.

Solution

  • Run your script with . 

    . myscript.sh

    This will run the script in the current shell environment.

    export governs which variables will be available to new processes, so if you say

    FOO=1
export BAR=2
./runScript.sh

    then $BAR will be available in the environment of runScript.sh, but $FOO will not.