Forcing environment in SSH

It's quite easy to force environments variables in an SSH session, since /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc etc. are read. But when you launch commands with SSH without opening a session, these files are not parsed, so it gets harder to set the environment.

So it can be useful to know that /etc/environment is read by SSH aswell as login. The format is "VARIABLE=VALUE" for each line. In my case, I needed to force TMPDIR to "/var/lib/gforge-dop/chroot/tmp" so I just put "TMPDIR=/var/lib/gforge-dop/chroot/tmp" in /etc/environment and it worked :)

You can test if your variable is added by doing :
ssh user@host env

and see if your variable is listed properly by env.


If you need to set environment variables per user, you can use ~/.ssh/environment. In order to do that, you need to set PermitUserEnvironment to "yes" in sshd_config and restart sshd.