Referencing environment variables in /etc/environment?

Posted by Stefan Kendall on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Stefan Kendall
Published on 2011-11-13T16:38:00Z Indexed on 2011/11/13 18:06 UTC
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configuration

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environment-variables

I recently discovered /etc/environment, which seems a more standard way to setup simple environment variables than scripts, but I was wondering if there was a way to back-reference environment variables in the /etc/environment file.

That is, I have this:

JAVA_HOME="/tools/java"
GRAILS_HOME="/tools/grails"
GROOVY_HOME="/tools/groovy"
GRADLE_HOME="/tools/gradle"
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"

If I try to add $JAVA_HOME/bin to the PATH definition, however, I get $JAVA_HOME/bin, and not the interpolated variable. To remedy this, I'm creating environment.sh in profile.d to add the /bin entries to the path, but this seems sloppy and disorganized.

Is there a way to backreference the environment variables in /etc/environment?

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