[ale] ubuntu install has no $PATH?

[David Tomaschik]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> A friend who is a very green Linux user installed Ubuntu (latest whatever
> version) and went to install adobe flash. It required some command line-fu
> (which he didn't have) so he called me.
>
> -> I'm not an ubuntu person <-
>
> So I was trying to find out what file type he was trying to install so I
> asked hi to open a terminal (he was in the normal X session) and run ls and
> tell me the name of the file he downloaded.
>
> It errored with "no command or file by than name". So I had him do a "pwd".
> Same error. Ditto on "echo $PATH"
>
> W   T   F    !!!!!
>
> the command he _needed_ to run was sudo apt-get flash.....   but he couldn't
> recall if it was saved in the Downloads directory or the home directory. So
> he tried to cd and it failed.
>
> Unfortunately, we were talking over the cell phones while I was in a busy
> and loud store so literally spelling out each letter of a working PATH
> "alpha bravo charlie" style was not going to happen.
>
> Now I have been pretty harsh on messed up distro stupids in the past but I
> can't fathom how an install could complete and leave no working path
> variables set.
>
> 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?
>
> James P. Kinney III

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.

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

-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE, LPIC-1
System Administrator/Open Source Advocate
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com