rats

[janet tuma]

Will I ever stop embarassing myself? I tried various times to add /home/roddyduk/bin to my path, I kept getting things messed up and having to log in and out...I did it so many times and NOW I see /home/roddyduk/bin IS in my path but I have no idea which of the many attempts got it there So question 26 on my pre-test remains blank despite success Sigh. Time to go back and play with the extra credit lab

[janet tuma]

Of course within 2 minutes after giving up I figure it out: I put tumawil on my path to see if it worked, since roddy was already there.

/home/cis90/tumajan $ PATH=$PATH:/home/cis90/tumawil
/home/cis90/tumajan $ echo $PATH
/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/cis90/bin:/home/cis90/tumajan/bin:.:/home/roddyduk/bin:/home/cis90/tumawil

[Rich Simms]

Hooray ... I knew you would get there!

The PATH variable is really important as you found out. The shell uses this variable to locate the commands to run. If a command/program is not on your path you will get the "command not found" error message. If you have an empty path it will seem like all your commands have vanished! The commands are still there of course but without important directories like /bin and /usr/bin being on your path, most of the normal commands you use will just result in showing that error message.