news, writing e-mail, and so on.

Setting environment variables is simple. For practice, try customizing
your shell's prompt and your text file viewer with environment variables.
First, let's get a bit of background information.

man less
This command lets you view the online manual for the less command. In
order to show you the text one screenful at a time, man invokes a pager
that shows you a new page of text each time you press the space bar. By
default, it uses the pager called more.

Go ahead and glance over the man page for less, which is an enhanced
pager. Scroll to a new page by pressing space; press q to quit. more will
also quit automatically when you reach the end of the man page.

export PAGER=less
After reading about the advantages of less, you might want to use it to
read man pages. To do this, you set the environment variable PAGER.

The command to set an environment variable within bash always has this
format:

export NAME=value
export means to move the variable from the shell into the environment.
This means that programs other than the shell (for instance, a file
viewer) will be able to access it.

echo $PAGER
This is the easiest way to see the value of a variable. $PAGER tells the