Question

As far as I can tell, variable assignment is the same whether it is or is not preceded by “export”. What’s it for?

Answer 1

Exported variables such as $HOME and $PATH are available to (inherited by) other programs run by the shell that exports them (and the programs run by those other programs, and so on) as environment variables. Regular (non-exported) variables are not available to other programs.

$ env | grep '^variable='
$                                 # No environment variable called variable
$ variable=Hello                  # Create local (non-exported) variable with value
$ env | grep '^variable='
$                                 # Still no environment variable called variable
$ export variable                 # Mark variable for export to child processes
$ env | grep '^variable='
variable=Hello
$
$ export other_variable=Goodbye   # create and initialize exported variable
$ env | grep '^other_variable='
other_variable=Goodbye
$

For more information, see the entry for the export builtin in the GNU Bash manual, and also the sections on command execution environment and environment.

Note that non-exported variables will be available to subshells run via ( ... ) and similar notations because those subshells are direct clones of the main shell:

$ othervar=present
$ (echo $othervar; echo $variable; variable=elephant; echo $variable)
present
Hello
elephant
$ echo $variable
Hello
$

The subshell can change its own copy of any variable, exported or not, and may affect the values seen by the processes it runs, but the subshell’s changes cannot affect the variable in the parent shell, of course.

Some information about subshells can be found under command grouping and command execution environment in the Bash manual.