Fedora 15 su user problem

Question

I'm new to Fedora 15 and Linux. I've stumbled upon a problem while installing Oracle XE; I can't set environment variables or do anything else - any change I make won't stick.

I'm using the terminal:

$ su --login
Password: *******

As an example: if I run history -c then log out, after logging in again the bash history is still there(same happens with environment variables,they are not there, none of them).

My user has this cat /etc/passwd:

mark:x:500:500:mark:/home/mark:/bin/bash

What should I change or what am I missing?

EDIT: I don't know if it's important but it's a VMware virtual machine(on a Windows XP system)

Answer 1

What you probably need to do is set all the variables associated with Oracle XE in your .bash_profile or .bashrc script and ensure they are exported.

Environment variables only exist for the lifetime of the shell process where you set them. If you want them the next time you login, you need to set them again. You can automate this by setting them in the shell startup script. For bash, you can put them in either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc. .bash_profile is executed when you login, and .bashrc is executed each time you open a new bash shell.

If you want an environment variable to be available to processes launched by a shell, you must export the variable. For example, export foo=1 sets the value of foo to 1 and exports it to all child processes of the shell.