How to set environment variable for everyone under

Question

Can I have certain settings that are universal for all my users?

Answer 1

Every process running under the Linux kernel receives its own, unique environment that it inherits from its parent. In this case, the parent will be either a shell itself (spawning a sub shell), or the 'login' program (on a typical system).

As each process' environment is protected, there is no way to 'inject' an environmental variable to every running process, so even if you modify the default shell .rc / profile, it won't go into effect until each process exits and reloads its start up settings.

Look in /etc/ to modify the default start up variables for any particular shell. Just realize that users can (and often do) change them in their individual settings.

Unix is designed to obey the user, within limits.

NB: Bash is not the only shell on your system. Pay careful attention to what the /bin/sh symbolic link actually points to. On many systems, this could actually be dash which is (by default, with no special invocation) POSIXLY correct. Therefore, you should take care to modify both defaults, or scripts that start with /bin/sh will not inherit your global defaults. Similarly, take care to avoid syntax that only bash understands when editing both, aka avoiding bashisms.

Answer 2

If your LinuxOS has this file:

/etc/environment

You can use it to permanently set environmental variables for all users.

Extracted from: http://www.sysadmit.com/2016/04/linux-variables-de-entorno-permanentes.html

Answer 3

man 8 pam_env

man 5 pam_env.conf

If all login services use PAM, and all login services have session required pam_env.so in their respective /etc/pam.d/* configuration files, then all login sessions will have some environment variables set as specified in pam_env's configuration file.

On most modern Linux distributions, this is all there by default -- just add your desired global environment variables to /etc/security/pam_env.conf.

This works regardless of the user's shell, and works for graphical logins too (if xdm/kdm/gdm/entrance/… is set up like this).