How do I reload Windows environment variables in Cygwin without rebooting?

Question

^{Note: this is a follow-up question to this answer.}

I updated my PATH environment variable using Windows 7's Environment Variables dialogue.

However, it seems that the only way to get Cygwin to pull the updated PATH is to reboot my machine, which is obviously far from an ideal solution, and plain problematic for server users.

Is it possible to get Cygwin to see updated Windows environment variables without rebooting the machine?

Answer 1

If you're updating Windows environment variables, you should be able to restart the Cygwin window and see the updated environment.

Alternatively, you can use Cygwin environment variables like:

export TEST_VARIABLE=value

Now the $TEST_VARIABLE will "value" you can confirm this by:

echo $TEST_VARIABLE
value

This should show you the above output.