<p>Thanks to all for the ideas. I'm certain my friend didn't change shells :-) at least not deliberately. His linux-fu is pretty much 0.<br>
I recall something about a default shell change from bash to dash? Could this be related?</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Jul 24, 2011 11:56 PM, "The Don Lachlan" <<a href="http://ale-at-ale.org">ale-at-ale.org</a>@<a href="http://unpopularminds.org">unpopularminds.org</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution">
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 11:18:30PM -0400, David Tomaschik wrote:<br>>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Jim Kinney <<a href="mailto:jim.kinney@gmail.com">jim.kinney@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>>> > Any ideas how during an install (that appeared to conclude correctly) Ubuntu<br>
>> > could have left off PATH? More importantly, ideas on how to NOT recreate<br>>> > this?<br>>> I cannot, for the life of me, figure out any way that PATH would not<br>>> be set, unless the user had somehow modified it in a profile file.<br>
>> Also, 'cd' and 'ls' should work fine even without a path, as they are<br>>> shell builtins (in bash at least). So is echo. Getting a "command<br>>> not found" type error from echo, cd, or ls, would take quite a bit of<br>
>> special work -- like some stripped busybox shell with those commands<br>>> missing.<br>> <br>> It's far more likely it's not bash at all. BTW, 'ls' is not a bash builtin.<br>> <br>> Perhaps he set his shell to dash or specifically opened a dash shell, which<br>
> then didn't inherit an environment and didn't have env files to read.<br>> <br>>> Can you get them to type "/bin/bash" to see if they get a better shell<br>>> out of that?<br>> <br>
> That is my first suggestion also. Check his login shell and what he clicked<br>> on, because it surely wasn't bash and that could easily foul things up.<br>> <br>> -L<br>> _______________________________________________<br>
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