My suggestion in message #11 was to actually type what I wrote in an XTerminal. That's why I had "simple" at the end.

You did something completely different and placed the variable definition inside some part of the build framework to be used when the binary is run.

In effect, it does the same thing but now the value is set and you can't play around with it as easily as if you had written it at a prompt.

(If you really want to understand the implication of defining variables on the command line like that, I'd suggest that you read the man page for /bin/sh.)