This may be more of a general question about Linux than be Slitaz specific. I did some reading on my own but I am getting confused. But I hope someone can help me out.

My problem is that a program I run needs some enviroment variable to be properly set in order to run. But for some reason, the program just do not see my environment variables.

For those environment variables, I put them in ".profile" under my account in format like this:

MY_ENV_NAME=env_value

That seems to set up properly because if I type "echo $MY_ENV_NAME" in a terminal I can see the value is properly set.

In trying to figure out why they are not seen by the program I type "bash" in the terminal, which supposedly set the shell to "bash". Now things changed I can see the variables are NOT set. "echo $MY_ENV_NAME" shows me nothing.

I then added the setting for my needed environment variables to ".bashrc" under my account. After rebooting I found the enviroment variables now shows up by "echo" before and after I type "bash".

But for some reason, that program still cannot see my enviroment variable.

I look further and found that the program I mentioned above actually runs a shell script first. In the script it has something like this:

#!/bin/bash/
#below variables are required
PROGRAM_VAR=$MY_ENV_NAME

As you can see, this script uses my enviroment variable to set its own variable that is requred to run the program. What I found is that the program variable is set to nothing as it does not see my own enviroment variable.

Is this about the scope of linux environment variable? Why the program does not read my environment variable?