17.2 Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be set to override some default settings in GPS:

‘GPS_ROOT’

Override the default root directory specified when GPS is built (during the configure process, see the file INSTALL in the GPS sources for more details) to access information such as the location of the translation files.

‘GPS_HOME’

Override the variable HOME if present. All the configuration files and directories used by GPS are either relative to $HOME/.gps (%HOME%\.gps under Windows) if GPS_HOME is not set, or to $GPS_HOME/.gps (respectively %GPS_HOME%\.gps) if set.

‘GPS_DOC_PATH’

Set the search path for the documentation. See Adding New Help Files.

‘GPS_CUSTOM_PATH’

Contains a list of directories to search for custom files. See Customizing through XML files for more details.

‘GPS_CHANGELOG_USER’

Contains the user and e-mail to use in the global ChangeLog files. Note that the common usage is to have two spaces between the name and the e-mail. Ex: "John Does <john.doe@home.com>"

‘GDK_USE_XFT’

Only relevant to Linux and Solaris (8 and above) systems. If this variable is set to 1, then the fonts used in most parts of gps will be anti-aliased fonts.

This option is enabled by default when running GPS locally (DISPLAY set to ":0.0") and disabled otherwise. Setting this variable explicitely overrides the default behavior.

‘GPS_STARTUP_PATH’

Contains the value of the PATH environment variable just before GPS was started. This is used by GPS to restore the proper environment before spawning applications, no matter what particular directories it needed to set for its own purpose.

‘GPS_STARTUP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH’

Same as GPS_STARTUP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH but for the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.