The shell environment
Every time you open a terminal, a shell starts - the program that takes your commands. You can set it up for yourself: define variables, shorten long commands, add your own directories of programs. So the settings do not vanish on restart, you write them into the file ~/.bashrc. In this lesson you do exactly that.
The file ~/.bashrc already exists in your home directory; you append to the end.
What to understand
An environment variable is a name=value pair that every running program can see. For example, EDITOR tells programs which editor to open text with.
PATH is the list of directories where the shell looks for a program by name. You type You are reading the open part. Buy the course to unlock the whole lesson and its lab.ls, the shell walks PATHThe rest of this lesson is part of a paid course