OSX - commands in terminal returning command not found

Question

I recently downloaded and installed scala(tried to anyway) and just noticed that commands in terminal are not found.. I was tinkering with my path variable so I assume that is the problem...

I was reading around and saw that all of those commands should be in /usr/bin directory.. so if i type /usr/bin/ls into terminal i should still get a list. But I can't seem to find any of those commands (ls, mv, cp, etc).. they are just nowhere to be found

Does anybody know how to fix this? thanks!

Answer 1

Not a fix, but most of those commands are found in /bin, not /usr/bin.

Answer 2

ls is in /bin

you need to modify the PATH environment variable to include the bin directory of your scala install.

for example, to add all the android sdk commands to my path, i put

export PATH=${PATH}:~/sdks/android-sdk-mac_86/tools

in my ~/.bash_profile

Be very careful when modifying the path. If you do it wrong, you will lose access to a lot of the system commands.

Answer 3

Put /bin in your path by running this command:

export PATH=$PATH:/bin

All these binaries exist in /bin under Mac OS.

Answer 4

if you add additional packages to your mac, there are some locations, which make the most sense, so that all users can use them.

These are /opt and /usr/local

I prefer /opt as does for example MacPorts.

So, to install Scala do the following

• Download Scala and unpack
• sudo mkdir -p /opt/scala
• sudo chown -R YOUR_USERNAME /opt/scala
• move contents from unpacked folder to /opt/scala, so that the structure will have a /opt/scala/bin folder

Now you have installed Scala. Next, you have to edit your PATH accordingly so that you can call the files in /opt/scala/bin from everywhere:

• Edit ~/.profile and add these lines

  export SCALA_HOME=/opt/scala

  export PATH=${SCALA_HOME}/bin:${PATH}

Now either close all Terminal windows and reopen them or in the window you have still open do a source ~/.profile

When you restart your Mac, your .profile will automatically be sourced. So the third option would be just to restart your Mac. :-)

Greetings,

Jan