terminal is messed up

I am trying to learn the terminal and for some reason basic commands don't work. I am trying "ls" and it says bash: ls :command not found. Although yesterday this was working fine. Is there a way to reinstall the terminal?

It's not the terminal, it's your path, or lack thereof. What do you get when you type:
echo $PATH

cradom said:

It's not the terminal, it's your path, or lack thereof. What do you get when you type:
echo $PATH

Click to expand...

/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:{ PATH} :/usr/local/bin

Hmmm...looks like something is messed up. Check your .bashrc or .bash_profile file for syntax errors. Probably where it says { PATH}. Should look like this: ${PATH}.

cradom said:

Hmmm...looks like something is messed up. Check your .bashrc or .bash_profile file for syntax errors. Probably where it says { PATH}. Should look like this: ${PATH}.

Click to expand...

where is that located? /etc/? I can't even su to root.

In your home directory/folder.

What rman said. You can open a terminal and type:
/bin/ls -a
to see if it's there. If you're not familiar with the pico editor or vi, you can open it and edit it with Textwrangler (free) from the Finder. Use the 'open hidden' menu item.

From what your $PATH shows, you might have DarwinPorts installed? Normally there is no /opt directory in OS X, and nothing in /usr/local/bin.

cradom said:

What rman said. You can open a terminal and type:
/bin/ls -a
to see if it's there. If you're not familiar with the pico editor or vi, you can open it and edit it with Textwrangler (free) from the Finder. Use the 'open hidden' menu item.

From what your $PATH shows, you might have DarwinPorts installed? Normally there is no /opt directory in OS X, and nothing in /usr/local/bin.

Click to expand...

It's funny, all this trouble started when I was trying to install blackbox window manager. Something told me to install DarwinPorts and I didn't do that right. Then something else told me to change my bash_profile file and add a line to it. I screwed up the line...

Anyways, bash_profile isn't under my home directory.

"Edit either /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile and add the following line at the end. You will need to re-login for the changes to take effect."

this is what I tried to follow.

thanks

I finally figured it out
it was etc/profile, and I had $P{PATH} instead of ${PATH}

thanks for all your help. this was a bit frustrating.

Actually, it's not a good idea to edit etc/profile because whatever is changed there will be global. It will affect all users on the machine, not just your account. If you screw up and create a new user to find the problem, you will have the same problem in the new user.

It's better to copy the file to your home folder or create a new one in your home folder so it just affects your account.

Like cradom suggested it is better to make change to you personal copy and not the system copy.

Sort of off topic but I wanted to mention anyways, iTerm is a handy free download for those of you who want a little bit more out of your Terminal.

and for no particular reason: I love pico. vi makes me cry.