Environment variables are strings that contain information about the environment for the system, and the currently logged on user. You can set the environment variables in the bash (command line shell) configuration files, but these are not recommended as they are not always picked up (eg.This step-by-step article describes how you can manage the environment variables in Windows XP. The standard way for global environment variables would be to add an entry in /etc/environment (you do not use the command export in this file as it is not a normal bash script) CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat You should add the setting at the start of one of these files (after any initial comments) To be really sure the setting is being picked up, add the above setting to one of the startup script for tomcat: yourtomcatfolder/bin/startup.sh To make the environment variable setting permanent, there are several places you can define the setting. This environment variable will now work within that terminal window, but if you open another window or logout/login you loose that setting. If for some reason you still need to set an environment variable you can open a terminal window and type in the command: export CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat

If you are installing tomcat outside the package manager (hopefully in /opt or somewhere else outside the managed file system), then running the TOMCAT/bin/startup.sh should use the relative location to define the CATALINA_HOME. If you are using the tomcat6 package from the Ubuntu repositories, then the CATALINA_HOME and other environment variables are already set, in the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 startup script.

Environment variables should already work

Apache ant access environment variables