Shell commands not recognized

sr_margo

04-18-2005, 10:18 AM

This is probably a very fundamental question but here goes.... I have a problem with my command prompt. I am using tcsh and made a modification to my .cshrc and .login files. When I open either X11 or Terminal apps they produce the following errors and do not understand basic commands like 'ls' and 'more'.

tcsh: stty: Command not found.
tcsh: uname: Command not found.
tcsh: uname: Command not found.
tcsh: tr: Command not found.
tcsh: uname: Command not found.
tcsh: uname: Command not found.
tcsh: tr: Command not found.

Please help!!

fat elvis

04-18-2005, 10:22 AM

have you been moving or deleting any files/folders from your computer?

sr_margo

04-18-2005, 10:29 AM

I deleted some files which should have been re-installed. I was performing an upgrade of some astronomy software.

I am beginning to feel more than a little worried...

yellow

04-18-2005, 10:33 AM

What if you use the fully qualified paths to those binaries?

/usr/bin/tr
/usr/bin/uname
/bin/stty

If that works, then you've probably just munged your path.
Tell us the returns of:
/bin/echo $PATH
/bin/echo $SHELL

sr_margo

04-18-2005, 10:40 AM

/usr/bin/tr
/usr/bin/uname
/bin/stty

These worked fine....maybe there is some hope for my iBook...

/bin/echo $PATH
/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin /usr/games /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin /usr/X11R6/bin

/bin/echo $SHELL
/bin/csh

Your help is very much appriciated.

hayne

04-18-2005, 10:51 AM

echo $PATH

/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin /usr/games /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin /usr/X11R6/bin

PATH is supposed to be a colon-separated list of directories. You appear to have spaces instead of colons.

sr_margo

04-18-2005, 10:55 AM

I think that my PATH variable is set up like:

setenv PATH = ( /sbin /bin )

I thought that was quite a valid way of doing it.....

sr_margo

04-18-2005, 10:58 AM

Thanks Hayne, changing that seems to have allowed me to access everything again....how wierd. I must have been wrong about the ( /sbin /bin ). Or is that a Bash thing.

dmacks

04-18-2005, 02:25 PM

Some shells (I know the *csh variants do) have a lowercase "$path" that is space-separated. But uppercase "$PATH" is always with colons.