FIT3084 Lecture Note Glossary

Environment Variables

Unix & MS-DOS provide a number of variables for passing information about the state of the user's environment, the state in which their shell is currently configured.
Under Unix, there may be environment variables (usually named in allcaps) storing the user's:
- home directory path (HOME)
- default printer (PRINTER)
- terminal type (TERM)
- current directory path (PWD)
- ...and lots besides.
From within a C program, environment variables may be read by calling

char* getenv(char*)

a function whose prototype appears within stdlib.h
From the Unix shell, environment variables may be read using printenv and set using setenv.
Refer to the Unix man pages for further details.
MIME type

Every document downloaded from the WWW has a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension type which informs a browser how to display the document it receives.

Documents are identified by their type and sub-type in a two field identifier. Documents of a particular MIME-type are often also identified by a standard file extension.

Sample MIME Types:
- application/mac-binhex40 (Macintosh BinHex 4.0 encoded format)
- application/msword (Micro$oft Word format)
- audio/x-aiff (AIFF sound format)
- audio/x-wav (Micro$oft 'WAV' sound format)
- text/html (HTML document)
- text/plain (Plain text document)
- video/mpeg (MPEG movie format)
- video/quicktime (Quicktime movie format)