Under the hood of your operating system lurks a world which the novice user will never see. Registry settings, configuration files, enviroment files and the command line. Enviroment settings are fundamental to how a lot of software works and normally are set up for you. So what are they?
Enviroment variables are essential key value pairs which give system wide infromation. You can think of them as global settings if you wish to as this is very close to the truth! Open up a command prompt and type in the following -
You should see a huge list of stuff printed out. These are all of the enviroment variables on your system. You can watch this video for windows to see how you can edit/view them graphcially.
You can set a variable by typing in the following -