Ubuntu – How to open ~/.pam_environment

I'm not sure why this isn't made more clear, but /etc/environment isn't parsed by any single bit of code or any particular shell (or necessarily any shell at all) (try grep -r "/etc/environment" /etc and you'll see what I mean). pam in particular parses it directly, not putting it through a shell.

By convention, and I do mean convention, it's pure key-value pairs, with values optionally quoted. You can't put anything that tries to do e.g. variable expansion or command execution in there and expect it to work.

I'd be surprised if you can find a strict, formal grammar definition anywhere.

Probably the closest to an authoritative answer you can come is the pam_env docs: http://www.linux-pam.org/Linux-PAM-html/sag-pam_env.html

~/.bash_profile is only sourced by bash when started in login mode. That is typically when you log in at the console (Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6), connect via ssh, or use sudo -i or su - to run commands as another user.

When you log in graphically, ~/.profile will be specifically sourced by the script that launches gnome-session (or whichever desktop environment you're using). So ~/.bash_profile is not sourced at all when you log in graphically.

When you open a terminal, the terminal starts bash in (non-login) interactive mode, which means it will source ~/.bashrc.

The right place for you to put these environment variables is in ~/.profile, and the effect should be apparent next time you log in.

Sourcing ~/.bash_profile from ~/.bashrc is the wrong solution. It's supposed to be the other way around; ~/.bash_profile should source ~/.bashrc.

See DotFiles for a more thorough explanation, including some history of why it is like it is.

(On a side note, when installing openjdk via apt, symlinks should be set up by the package, so that you don't really need to set JAVA_HOME or change PATH)