Export Command

Why should we mostly use export for setting environmental variables?

Every process has its own specific environmental variables and doesn’t share it with the other processes. Imagine that we have process a. In process a we set an environment variable called EXAMPLE_VARIABLE=10. Now, process a has access to this variable, so if we print it out like this:

echo $EXAMPLE_VARIABLE

the output would be, 10. But the subprocesses of this process don’t have access to this variable. for example, if I have Python file, named export_example.py, like below:

# export_example.py

import os

print(os.getenv("EXAMPLE_VARIABLE", "Not found"))

Which, if EXAMPLE_VARIABLE is on the environmental variables, it just prints it and if not, it says it doesn’t exist. Now if we run this python file with python export_command.py, the output would be.

There is no EXAMPLE_VARIABLE in environment variables

But, if we set our environmental variable like below:

export EXAMPLE_VARIABLE=10

Then run our python file, the output would be:

Also, the output of echo $EXAMPLE_VARIABLE would be 10 to.

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Export Command

Export Command