What does %VARIABLE% means?

Question

At many times I see %VARIABLE% (%PYTHON% for exemple) in questions and answers here in Stack Overflow.

I know that this is kinda vague question but I would like to know the meaning of %VARIABLE% more clearly.

Thanks in advice.

Answer 1

The answer probably depends on the author and context;-)

MS Windows console environment variables are delimited by % , so if you saw this in a windows batch script that's most likely a reference to an environment variable of the given name.

In the absence of any context I'd guess your particular example %PYTHON% probably means "the filesystem pathname to the Python interpreter", but perhaps the post in question is setting it to something else in context.