Question

How to remove/delete an exported environment variable?

Hi all,

I was working with a remote API and I exported my API key so that I could have it available as an environment variable for my current shell session, as follows:

  1. export API_KEY=MY_API_KEY_HERE

However my workflow requires that at some point this env variable should be deleted, but I don’t want to log out and log in back again each time.

What is a good way to delete an environment variable?

Thanks!

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• July 22, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hello,

What I usually do is to use the unset command. All that you need to do is to run the following:

  1. unset API_KEY

If you are writing a script, for example, to check if this is working you could have the following check:

if [ ${API_KEY} ] ; then 
    echo $API_KEY 
else
    echo "No API Key Found"
fi

Or you could also use the printenv command which would print all of your currently available environment variables.

Hope that this helps!

Regards, Bobby