Linux Commands: printenv

printenv is used to print out the environment variables. Environment variables are a common form of setting global values across a terminal session. Environment variables can be set by the systems, automation scripts, or by the user.

You can print your all environment variables using just printenv.

If you want to print the value of a specific variable you can use printenv <variable name>.

Conclusion

If you are ever stuck and want to know what was the value of the environment variable you can use it. I have found myself using this quite often when debugging issues in production or on my local machine.

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Comments

[Michael Currin]

I haven't seen this before. I use env which is similar to printenv

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1...

View variables.

env

And to search:

env | grep PATH

Or just

echo $PATH

I see you cover env in the next post for modifying environment but not for reading it

[Umesh Yadav]

Hey, yes actually you can grep the output of the env and get the values or echo works as well. Most the people use what you have mentioned above and very few people are aware about printenv and how easy it is to use. That's the only reason wrote about it. Thanks for the feedback on the env blog, I will surely consinder adding more about reading a varibale.

[Michael Currin]

printenv FOO is longer to type than echo $FOO and also it is less flexible. You can't do something like echo "$FOO $BAR"

Maybe you can make an alias:

alias p=printenv

So you can run

p FOO