- All processes have environment variables
- Names and values are strings (usually the names are all caps, like PATH, HOME, TZ, etc.)
- Initialised by the kernel
- They are passed down to their children terminals (perfect copies of the og variables) meaning that changing them there will NOT affect the OG
printenvprints the environment variables.- Otherwise they are identical to regular shell variables (the only difference is that environment variables try to stick to UPPER CASE styling)