Modifying an environment-variable setting

About this task

Sometimes you must add information to an environment variable that is already set. For example, the PATH environment variable is always set on UNIX™. When you use HCL OneDB™ productd, you must add to the PATH setting the name of the directory where the executable files for the HCL OneDB products are stored.

In the following example, the ONEDB_HOME is /usr/informix. (That is, during installation, the HCL OneDB products were installed in the /usr /informix directory.) The executable files are in the bin subdirectory, /usr/informix/bin. To add this directory to the front of the C shell PATH environment variable, use the following command:
setenv PATH /usr/informix/bin:$PATH
Rather than entering an explicit pathname, you can use the value of the ONEDB_HOME environment variable (represented as $ONEDB_HOME), as the following example shows:
setenv ONEDB_HOME /usr/informix
setenv PATH $ONEDB_HOME/bin:$PATH
You might prefer to use this version to ensure that your PATH entry does not conflict with the search path that was set in ONEDB_HOME, and so that you are not required to reset PATH whenever you change ONEDB_HOME. If you set the PATH environment variable on the C shell command line, you might be required to include braces ( {} ) with the existing ONEDB_HOME and PATH, as the following command shows:
setenv PATH ${ONEDB_HOME}/bin:${PATH}

For more information about how to set and modify environment variables, see the publications for your operating system.