In Mac OSX 10.5, it can't find my Terminal commands sudo, find, etc.

Question

I don't know what has happened, but in my Terminal on Mac OSX 10.5 it can no longer find my sudo command, or find command, etc. They are there because if I put /usr/bin/sudo or /usr/bin/find it works fine...

My .bash_login file looks like this: export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin$PATH"

My .bash_profile file looks like this: export PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django_trunk/django/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin/sudo$PATH"

I'll say now, I don't really know what I'm doing with the Terminal. I'm just a beginner to it all, and I must of done something for the environment variables (is that what they're called?) to be lost. I presumed I'd just have to make sure the /usr/bin/ path is in my bash files, but they are, and it doesn't seem to work. Please help!

Also, when I do use the /usr/bin/find command, it says "Permission denied" to me, even though I am logged into Mac OSX as the System Administrator account. I don't understand.

Any help would be grand. Thank you - James

Answer 1

It looks like both of your PATH exports are malformed:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin$PATH"

The end bit there won't work. It should be:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH

Notice the colon before '$PATH'? It's important ;)

Also, the double quotes are not necessary.

If this doesn't work, we will need more information. It is possible that something else is modifying your path even after your shell configurations are loaded.

Can you post the results of:

$ echo $PATH

Configuration files are not always a good indication of the current environment variables, since they are modified by many programs and files, all across your system. To see all of your environment variables, you can run:

$ env

Answer 2

Check out --- http://www.sweeting.org/mark/blog/2008/05/26/mac-os-x-tip-setting-path-environment-variables