At command line I did 'set' and this gave a long listing which might have scrolled off the top of screen. What is showing on screen is no line starting with PATH= , nearest to it is a line 'verbose= no = path'

Ted wrote

On 12-Jun-07 22:31:22, elc wrote:

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Tried what you suggested Adam, and got 'command not found' for aptitude install apt. Also had 'command not found' for sudo aptitude install apt

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Looks to me as though your PATH is empty, so your shell has nowhere to look for the commands.

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From you command line, enter:

set

and look down the resulting list for a line that starts with "PATH=...."

If you do not find one, then you have an empty PATH and that is the problem. On the other hand, if you get a result which includes things like

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:....

then you have real problems. In particular, the command 'ls' should be in /bin. and therefore found; the command 'man' should be in /usr/bin and likewise found. So in that case there is something seriously wrong with your installation.

If you have an empty PATH, this means that some initial configuration is not taking place when you log in, and we can probably help you track that down (there are not a lot of possibilities for what could go wrong there).

But if you get a PATH like the above, it's trouble!

('set', by the way, should work regardless of your PATH since it is a shell command and not a binary. On the other hand, if your PATH is empty, then 'echo $PATH' will not work, since 'echo' is in /bin. Nor will 'env', since it is also in /bin)).

Hoping this helps. Let us know what you see!

Ted.