General Variables

AUTHORCOPY

The name of a file used to archive news articles posted with the GNUS package.

CDPATH

Used by the cd command to search for the directory you specify, when you specify a relative directory name.

DOMAINNAME

The name of the Internet domain that the machine running Emacs is located in. Used by the GNUS package.

EMACS_UNIBYTE

Defining this environment variable directs Emacs to do almost everything with single-byte buffers and strings. It is equivalent to using the `--unibyte' command-line option on each invocation. See section Initial Options.

EMACSDATA

Used to initialize the variable data-directory used to locate the architecture-independent files that come with Emacs. Setting this variable overrides the setting in `paths.h' when Emacs was built.

EMACSLOADPATH

A colon-separated list of directories from which to load Emacs Lisp files. Setting this variable overrides the setting in `paths.h' when Emacs was built.

EMACSLOCKDIR

The directory that Emacs places lock files--files used to protect users from editing the same files simultaneously. Setting this variable overrides the setting in `paths.h' when Emacs was built.

EMACSPATH

The location of Emacs-specific binaries. Setting this variable overrides the setting in `paths.h' when Emacs was built.

ESHELL

Used for shell-mode to override the SHELL environment variable.

HISTFILE

The name of the file that shell commands are saved in between logins. This variable defaults to `~/.history' if you use (t)csh as shell, to `~/.bash_history' if you use bash, to `~/.sh_history' if you use ksh, and to `~/.history' otherwise.

HOME

The location of the user's files in the directory tree; used for expansion of file names starting with a tilde (`~'). On MS-DOS, it defaults to the directory from which Emacs was started, with `/bin' removed from the end if it was present.

HOSTNAME

The name of the machine that Emacs is running on.

INCPATH

A colon-separated list of directories. Used by the complete package to search for files.

INFOPATH

A colon-separated list of directories holding info files. Setting this variable overrides the setting in `paths.el' when Emacs was built.

LANG

LC_ALL

LC_CTYPE

The user's preferred locale. A locale name which contains `8859-n', `8859_n' or `8859n' automatically specifies the `Latin-n' language environment when Emacs starts up.

LOGNAME

The user's login name. See also USER.

MAIL

The name of the user's system mail inbox.

MAILRC

Name of file containing mail aliases. This defaults to `~/.mailrc'.

MH

Name of setup file for the mh system. This defaults to `~/.mh_profile'.

NAME

The real-world name of the user.

NNTPSERVER

The name of the news server. Used by the mh and GNUS packages.

ORGANIZATION

The name of the organization to which you belong. Used for setting the `Organization:' header in your posts from the GNUS package.

PATH

A colon-separated list of directories in which executables reside. (On MS-DOS, it is semicolon-separated instead.) This variable is used to set the Emacs Lisp variable exec-path which you should consider to use instead.

PWD

If set, this should be the default directory when Emacs was started.

REPLYTO

If set, this specifies an initial value for the variable mail-default-reply-to. See section Mail Header Fields.

SAVEDIR

The name of a directory in which news articles are saved by default. Used by the GNUS package.

SHELL

The name of an interpreter used to parse and execute programs run from inside Emacs.

TERM

The name of the terminal that Emacs is running on. The variable must be set unless Emacs is run in batch mode. On MS-DOS, it defaults to `internal', which specifies a built-in terminal emulation that handles the machine's own display.

TERMCAP

The name of the termcap library file describing how to program the terminal specified by the TERM variable. This defaults to `/etc/termcap'.

TMPDIR

Used by the Emerge package as a prefix for temporary files.

TZ

This specifies the current time zone and possibly also daylight savings information. On MS-DOS, the default is based on country code; see the file `msdos.c' for details.

USER

The user's login name. See also LOGNAME. On MS-DOS, this defaults to `root'.

VERSION_CONTROL

Used to initialize the version-control variable (see section Single or Numbered Backups).

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