Quoting Andreas Brusinsky,

> I attempted to set an environment variable in rc.local
> ( WWW_HOME=http:/... ; export WWW_HOME)
> that should be set fo all users but it did not work. 

> Probably rc.local is allready running in a subshell and
> once it is finished it's settings are lost?

Well, if you wanted to be really global, you could change and recompile
login(1). But you don't really want to do that. You'll be better off
using the global startup files that most shells support, like
/etc/csh.cshrc (csh) or /etc/profile (sh). For other shells, like
ksh, you may need to recompile to enable this feature.

- Frank