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Asked: 2026-05-20T18:58:45+00:00

Suddenly I lost almost everything on the command line. I can do cd ,

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Suddenly I lost almost everything on the command line. I can do cd, exit and pwd…nothing else that I tried…no ls, no vi…nothing….

I do have an open terminal that’s still working, but no new ones…as soon as I exit out of the current session, I’m screwed…

I was about to say I’m baffled…but I just noticed that now /etc is symlinked to /etc/private. Don’t remember that being the case before…

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard…but I’ve rebooted since with no problems… No clue when this came about…

Any ideas on debugging it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It sounds like your PATH environment variable may be messed up. You may have messed it up in a .profile, .bashrc, .tcshrc, .login or similar shell startup file. Check using:

    echo $PATH

    Then (assuming you are using a bash shell) try setting it with:

    export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin

    You could also try typing commands using the full path, e.g. /bin/ls. If you want to make sure that your commands are still there you should be able to use echo /bin/* /usr/bin/*.

    /etc has always been a symbolic link to private/etc on Mac OS X.

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