Gfilui

Apologies for this vague question in advance, but I don't know how to narrow this down.

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS, using OpenSSH_6.6.1p1 Ubuntu-2ubuntu2.10, OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014 as my ssh client. I set up passwordless ssh according to these instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/openssh-server.html.

Now, ssh works as expected, except all variables that I define in .bashrc or .profile are ignored (yes, I'm aware that .profile sources .bashrc). All posts related to this issue I could find on askubuntu.com, or stackexchange or the like did not solve this issue.

Local variables exist on both the local and the remote machine, but when I ssh into the remote machine, they aren't there, which means they're missing from the output of 'ssh ab.cd.efg.hij env'; likewise, ssh ab.cd.efg.hij 'echo $LOCAL_VARIABLE' gives no output.

What could be the reason for this behavior?

EDIT

I did not have .bash_profile or .bash_login on the remote machine, as asked by steeldriver. I added export LOCAL_VARIABLE=foo to one and then the other, but it's still missing from 'ssh ab.cd.efg.hij env' and ssh ab.cd.efg.hij 'echo $LOCAL_VARIABLE'.

Bash reads .profile* when run as an interactive login shell. When a command is given for execution, or when running a script, it is non-interactive unless you give the -i option, and non-login unless you give the -l option, etc. Neither of this is usually possible when executing commands via SSH.

Bash does read .bashrc when run non-interactively by SSH. However, the default .bashrc includes a check for interactive use:

# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
 *i*) ;;
 *) return;;
esac

So effectively, no variable set in .profile or .bashrc is available when you do ssh foo some-command. You can put the variables in .bashrc before the check for interactive execution. For example:

$ head ~/.bashrc
echo foo
# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
case $- in
 *i*) ;;
 *) return;;
esac
$ ssh localhost env
foo
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8
SSH_CONNECTION=127.0.0.1 46916 127.0.0.1 22
LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8
XDG_SESSION_ID=155
USER=muru
...

The echo foo was executed. If I had export foo=bar, then foo would have showed up in the env output.

* with suitable caveats about the presence of files like .bash_profile, etc.