missing commands and other disasters

jakez · #1 September 13th, 2002, 01:09 AM

hi, i've got sort of a situation here that i cant find a solution to anywhere else, and i've found this forum to be helpful, so here goes:

my darwin is missing commands! meaning some commands which are generally regarded as "basic" don't exist in my /bin directory, and so i get the message "command not found". theres no man, less, who, grep, su to name a few. now, i'm relatively new to unix, but not to computers, and i'm not a total moron. its just rather frustrating to read a tutorial or something that says "oh, just type in this basic command, blah blah blah, that works on all unix systems" only to find it doesn't work on mine!

another thing, i successfully installed fink (trying to install X windows), but then it doesn't download. it says theres no download program, like curl or wget. however, curl is supposedly included in os x, and then i went out and additionally installed wget, but still doesn't work. curl for some reason cant be found, but wget works from the command line. fink for some reason just cant find it.

i also made sure to install the development tools cd. pico and pine are supposedly included as well, but i had to go out and find and install them, too. what is wrong with my os? why is so much stuff missing? where can i find whats missing and put it into my system? any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks

uoba · #2 September 13th, 2002, 04:20 AM

I know there is an app called Pacifist (do a search on www.versiontracker.com/macosx) which allows you to pick out individual installations from the OSX CD. But, I'm not to positive that it would include those Unix utilities.

Hmmm, are you in a position to do a system reinstallation?

gumse · #3 September 13th, 2002, 04:49 AM

I think you have a path problem.
man , grep ... are located in /usr/bin , check if they are there. If they are, check your path "echo $path" to see what is included.
Follow the instructions in /usr/share/tcsh/examples/README to set everything up ok.

jakez · #4 September 13th, 2002, 06:09 AM

i wish that was it, but i checked, not there. you were on the right track with the path for wget tho , it was in /usr/local/bin and i moved it to /usr/bin and now fink is finding it. i'm still having trouble updating the list of packages with apt-get however. it looks for files in /sw/fink/dists/local/ and other directories in and around there and isn't finding them, but at least i'm getting wget to sort of work, and it looks like fink is doing alright downloading xfree86. any other ideas about the commands? at any rate its nice to know that they SHOULD be there, and its not just me going crazy

DMCrimson · #5 September 16th, 2002, 10:25 AM

Jakez, you should not mopve programs from one loation to another, so other app relying on finding them on default location cannot find them afterwards...rather you need to set your path-variables as gumse said. If you use tcsh, follow his directions, if you use bash, check /etc/profile and edit it so that it conytains the necessary paths...also, fink relies on developer package to run...