How to set a socks proxy server only for one user?

in Ubuntu 13.04 I tried to insert

export socks_proxy=socks://address:port

into ~/.profile but this is not working.

PS: I need to set it only for a user so not in /etc/enviroment.

1 Answer

A few points:

• Environment variables are case-sensitive. Environment variables like this tend to be uppercase.

• If you're testing in bash, note the top of the ~/.profile file:

  # ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
  # This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
  # exists.
  # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
  # the files are located in the bash-doc package.

• The help wiki recommends using ~/.pam_environment instead of other files for session environment variables.

• Its syntax is different than what you're expecting. See:

• So (assuming ~/.pam_environment) you're probably looking for:

  SOCKS_PROXY DEFAULT=socks://address:port

Otherwise this is probably just a case issue.

You mention that you're using a browser and in there may lie the actual issue. Firefox, ignores environment variables by default. There is a plugin that will look for environment variables though (it's quite old):

I'm not sure how other browsers handle these things but I wouldn't be surprised if they do also ignore them.