13 The LUX Environment

LUX needs to know where certain auxilliary files and devices are located on your computer system. To that end, you need to specify some environment variables in your computer’s operating system. LUX will read those environment variables when it needs to find one of the files or devices.

LUX may inspect the following environment variables:

LUX_PATH

This variable should contain a list of names of the directories where LUX is to search for user-defined LUX scripts (e.g., user definitions of routines and functions) . The directories must be separated by colons (:).

LUXDIR

This variable should contain the name of the directory where the LUX help file lux.texi is stored.

LUXFONTSDIR

This variable should contain the path where the LUX font files (font003.hex0 and similar other ones) can be found, if that path is not /usr/share/lux or /usr/local/share/lux.

LUXDRIVE0, LUXDRIVE1, …

These variables should contain the names of external storage devices such as tape drives. The device linked to the name LUXDRIVE0 is accessed as tape drive 0 in LUX, and LUXDRIVE1 links to tape drive 1, etcetera.

The make command, when used in LUX’s source directory, generates a shell script .luxenv that contains definitions for these environment variables. The definition for LUXDIR in that script is correct after you install the relevant LUX files through make install. The definitions for LUX_PATH and LUXDRIVE0 in that script are examples.

You are welcome to set the environment variables yourself. How you specify environment variables depends on your operating system, and these variables may have a different name on different operating systems. On a UNIX-like system (Unix, Ultrix, Linux, Irix, Solaris, etc.), you specify environment variables as shown in the following examples:

Using tcsh, csh:

setenv LUX_PATH         ".:~/lux/lib:~/lux/slib"
setenv LUXDRIVE0        "/dev/rmt/0n"

Using sh, ksh, or bash:

LUX_PATH=".:~/lux/lib:~/lux/slib"
LUXDRIVE0="/dev/rmt/0n"