making environment variable permanent

Question

shell> export HISTTIMEFORMAT=\'%F %T \'
shell> history | tail -n 2
 1006  2010-01-16 00:55:47  export HISTTIMEFORMAT=\'%F %T \'
 1007  2010-01-16 00:55:49 hist         


        

Answer 1

Add it to your ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile - one of these will be read when bash starts. .bash_profile is read when you login, .bashrc is read when you create a new interactive non-login shell (such as opening a terminal window from X)