Why isn't my environment variable visible from the command line?

Question

I'm trying to run the James SMTP server on Lion (Mac OS X 10.7.2). When I do this:

sudo JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home ./james-2.3.2/bin/run.sh

it works fine.

However, I'd like to make JAVA_HOME an environment variable so it is visible to other applications too.

I edited ~/.bash_profile to look like this:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/home

and the variable appears to be visible from the command line like so:

$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/Library/Java/home

But when I run james again like this, I get a warning about JAVA_HOME:

$ sudo ./james-2.3.2/bin/run.sh
ERROR: JAVA_HOME not found in your environment.

Please, set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the
location of the Java Virtual Machine you want to use.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Why can't the command to run james see the JAVA_HOME environment variable?

Any info is greatly appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

sudo resets the environment variables to safe defaults.

If you want to preserve that variable, you need to visudo and add this:

Defaults env_keep = "JAVA_HOME"

Please note that carrying user environment variables over to privileged accounts is a possible security risk.

Answer 2

I am not sure whether Lion has an /etc directory or not (I assume it does) or whether /etc/bashprofile or /etc/bashrc is actually in that directory, but if you want to make this change system-wide, just look for either of these files, edit it, and make the change there as so:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/Java/

Next log in will pick up the change and will be persisted.