What's the difference between a System property and environment variable

Question

I am not clear about this. When I run a java App or run an Applet in applet viewer, (in the IDE environment), System.getProperty(\"java.class.path\") gives me

Answer 1

System.getProperty("Propertname") **Platform Independent** 

The above method will return JVM arguments and properties.

System.getenv("EnvName")       **Platform Dependent**

The above method returns your operating system environment variables.

In Linux you can set a environment variable from the shell using the following command.

export SYSTEM_TYPE=PROD

In Java you can read the variable by

System.getenv("SYSTEM_TYPE")

The above code will return PROD

http://javarevisited.blogspot.in/2012/08/how-to-get-environment-variables-in.html