UNIX export command

Question

I am trying to understand the use of export command    I tried using man export  but there is no manual for this command    Can anyone please help me out understanding the use of export in UNIX

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export is used to set environment variables  For example   export EDITOR pico   Will set your default text editor to be the pico command

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Unix  The commands env  set  and printenv display all environment variables and their values  env and set are also used to set environment variables and are often incorporated directly into the shell  printenv can also be used to print a single variable by giving that variable name as the sole argument to the command   In Unix  the following commands can also be used  but are often dependent on a certain shell   export VARIABLE value    for Bourne  bash  and related shells setenv VARIABLE value    for csh and related shells   You can have a look at this at

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When you execute a program the child program inherits its environment variables from the parent  For instance if  HOME is set to  root in the parent then the child s  HOME variable is also set to  root   This only applies to environment variable that are marked for export  If you set a variable at the command-line like    FOO  bar    That variable will not be visible in child processes  Not unless you export it     export FOO   You can combine these two statements into a single one in bash  but not in old-school sh      export FOO  bar    Here s a quick example showing the difference between exported and non-exported variables  To understand what s happening know that sh -c creates a child shell process which inherits the parent shell s environment     FOO bar   sh -c  echo  FOO     export FOO   sh -c  echo  FOO  bar   Note  To get help on shell built-in commands use help export  Shell built-ins are commands that are part of your shell rather than independent executables like  bin ls

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export is a built-in command of the bash shell and other Bourne shell variants    It is used to mark a shell variable for export to child processes

[bash] UNIX export command

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