In order to set a value to an existing environment variable, we use an assignment expression. For instance, to set the value of the "LANG" variable to "he_IL.UTF-8", we use the following command:
If we use an assignment expression for a variable that doesn't exist, the shell will create a shell variable, which is similar to an environment variable but does not influence the behavior of other applications.
A shell variable can be exported to become an environment variable with the export command. To create the "EDITOR" environment variable and assign the value "nano" to it, you can do: