### 17.2 Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be set to override some default settings in GPS:

‘`GPS_ROOT`’
  Override the default root directory specified when GPS is built (during the configure process, see the file `INSTALL` in the GPS sources for more details) to access information such as the location of the translation files.
‘`GPS_HOME`’
  Override the variable HOME if present. All the configuration files and directories used by GPS are either relative to $HOME/.gps (%HOME%\.gps under Windows) if GPS_HOME is not set, or to $GPS_HOME/.gps (respectively %GPS_HOME%\.gps) if set.
‘`GPS_DOC_PATH`’
  Set the search path for the documentation. See Adding New Help Files.
‘`GPS_CUSTOM_PATH`’
  Contains a list of directories to search for custom files. See Customizing through XML and Python files for more details.
‘`GPS_CHANGELOG_USER`’
  Contains the user and e-mail to use in the global ChangeLog files. Note that the common usage is to have two spaces between the name and the e-mail. Ex: "John Does <john.doe@home.com>"
‘`GPS_STARTUP_PATH`’
  Contains the value of the `PATH` environment variable just before GPS was started. This is used by GPS to restore the proper environment before spawning applications, no matter what particular directories it needed to set for its own purpose.
‘`GPS_STARTUP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH`’
  Same as `GPS_STARTUP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH` but for the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` variable.
‘`GPS_MEMORY_MONITOR`’
  If set, GPS will add special code on every allocation and deallocation, thus slowing things down a bit, that makes it possible to check where the biggest amount of memory is allocated, through the `GPS.debug_memory_usage` python command.
‘`GPS_PYTHONHOME`’
  If set, the Python interpreter will look for libraries in the subdirectory lib/python<version> of the directory contained in `GPS_PYTHONHOME`.