Exporting environment variables in ~/.bash_profile produces wrong values

Asked Apr 27 '20 at 14:40

Active Apr 27 '20 at 14:58

Viewed 41 times

On my MacBook with MacOS Catalina I try to export multiple environment variables by setting them in the ~/.bash_profile file. I proceed as follows:

touch ~/.bash_profile
open ~/.bash_profile

Then the file ~/.bash_profile opens in my text editor and I add multiple environment variables:

export VAR1="some_value"
export VAR2="some_value"
export VAR3="some_value"
export VAR4="some_value"
export VAR5="some_value"

Then I save the file and apply the changes as follows:

source ~/.bash_profile

Now I should be able to access the values of the newly defined variables. If I type echo ${VAR1} or echo ${VAR2} I get the correct value some_value, but if I type echo ${VAR3} I get export$lue, i.e. the first seven characters are replaced by export$.

Any advice?

edited Apr 27 '20 at 14:58

asked Apr 27 '20 at 14:40

MathMax

What happens if you put different values for VAR1/2/..? Like export VAR1="some_value1"; export VAR2="some_value2"; export VAR3="some_value3"; export VAR4="some_value4"; export VAR5="some_value5" – Andrea Camisa Apr 27 '20 at 15:00
1

I guess you pasted a carriage return somewhere. – Benjamin W. Apr 27 '20 at 15:05
@BenjaminW. You nailed the issue. Thank you! – MathMax Apr 27 '20 at 15:09
@AndreaCamisa thank you for your suggestion, but duplicate values were not the culprit. – MathMax Apr 27 '20 at 15:10
The canonical Q&A is here: https://stackoverflow.com/q/39527571/3266847 – Benjamin W. Apr 27 '20 at 15:18
I was actually thinking to differentiating the values of the variables to have more feedback / debug. But @BenjaminW is right, carriage return was the problem. – Andrea Camisa Apr 28 '20 at 16:29

Exporting environment variables in ~/.bash_profile produces wrong values

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