How to fix the issue of environment variable changes not working in Linux?

6 months ago

2 minutes

If the environment variables are not taking effect after adding them, it may be due to incorrect placement of the environment variable settings or not properly refreshing the environment variables.

Here is the solution:

Check the location of the environment variable settings: Environment variables can be set in the user’s .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile files, as well as in global configuration files such as /etc/environment. Make sure the environment variables are set in the correct location.
Manually refresh the environment variables by running commands such as “source ~/.bashrc” or “source ~/.bash_profile” in the terminal.
Sometimes you need to restart the system for changes to environment variables to take effect.
Check if environment variables are being overridden: if the same environment variable is set in different configuration files, it may be overridden by the later setting. Make sure there are no cases of the same environment variable being set multiple times.
Add environmental variables using the export command: Manually add environmental variables in the terminal by using the export command, for example, export PATH=$PATH:/new/path.

If none of the above methods resolve the issue, there may be other problems with the environment variable settings, it is recommended to carefully check the environment variable settings and refresh method.