[ale] ubuntu install has no $PATH?

[The Don Lachlan]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 11:18:30PM -0400, David Tomaschik wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Any ideas how during an install (that appeared to conclude correctly) Ubuntu
> > could have left off PATH? More importantly, ideas on how to NOT recreate
> > this?
> I cannot, for the life of me, figure out any way that PATH would not
> be set, unless the user had somehow modified it in a profile file.
> Also, 'cd' and 'ls' should work fine even without a path, as they are
> shell builtins (in bash at least).  So is echo.  Getting a "command
> not found" type error from echo, cd, or ls, would take quite a bit of
> special work -- like some stripped busybox shell with those commands
> missing.

It's far more likely it's not bash at all. BTW, 'ls' is not a bash builtin.

Perhaps he set his shell to dash or specifically opened a dash shell, which
then didn't inherit an environment and didn't have env files to read.

> Can you get them to type "/bin/bash" to see if they get a better shell
> out of that?

That is my first suggestion also. Check his login shell and what he clicked
on, because it surely wasn't bash and that could easily foul things up.

-L