2.4 Setting your environment

If you want to use the newly installed package without having to specify its full path, you will need to modify the relevant variables in your environment, such as PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, INFOPATH, etc. These variables inform your system of the locations of relevant files on it. For example, PATH contains a list of all directories that contain executable files.

There is a sample script setup.sh in the top-level GSRC directory which can be used to set the main environment variables.

$ source setup.sh

Note that you need to load this file into the current shell with the source command, instead of executing it (which would only apply the definitions temporarily in a subshell).

After loading this file, your environment variables should include the target directory so you can run the new packages directly:

$ echo $PATH
/gnu/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
$ which hello
/gnu/bin/hello

If you want to restore your original environment variables they are saved in the variables ORIG_PATH, ORIG_LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.

$ PATH=$ORIG_PATH
$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORIG_LD_LIBRARY_PATH