Terminal Commands Not Working

[danj35]

Hi,

For some reason some terminal commands which I assume should be working by default are not working, including: netstat and lsof.

I am running on Snow Leopard, 10.6.8. I guess this might have something to with the terminal commands file? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

 

[Dysfunction]

What do you mean by 'not working'?

 

[danj35]

It says 'command not found'.

 

[Dysfunction]

is /usr/sbin in your path?

 

[danj35]

Yes it is. I can't see netstat or lsof in there. Quite odd. Is there a way of installing these?

 

[Dysfunction]

They SHOULD be installed by default. I'm not aware of any method of installing them manually. I don't believe that either require xCode to be installed.

 

[danj35]

Bah. I can only find a netstat widget online. I have no idea why they're not there to begin with!

 

[Dysfunction]

Was this a new install? Used computer? etc?

could try a

sudo find / |grep lsof

and see it it's just in an oddball location I suppose

 

[danj35]

I've inherited it at work and it seems as though you're right. Having now found the folder where there progs are I can only open them and not use them as commands e.g., 'netstat -r' or 'lsof -i -P | grep -i "listen"'. Any ideas how to amend this? Thanks for your help.

 

[Dysfunction]

Sure, you can simply add the directory to your path. You'd just need to add something like

export PATH=/path/to/commandsPATH

to your .profile or .bashrc , etc then restart your terminal login

 

[vansmith]

I've no idea why this would have happened (why these binaries are in non-standard directories). I wonder how much is in non-standard locations...

Out of curiosity, where did you end up finding these tools?

 

[IvanLasston]

Are they executable? i.e.

ls -l netstat 
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  218752 Jul 20 16:30 netstat*

The x bits should be set.
So they do have to be in the Path as dysfunction mentions, but they also have to be executable.

chmod 555 netstat

will change the file to an executable.

 

[danj35]

It was in a folder named /usr/tbin/. Netstat is executable thanks. So to be clear (as a nube) I'm exporting to .profile using the command: '

export PATH=/usr/tbin:$PATH

'. In which case it didn't work (having restarted terminal). Thanks again for the help.

 

[vansmith]

The export command will only work for the session. You need to add that to your .bash_profile in your home directory such that the path is added every time you open up Terminal.

I don't understand why you have a /usr/tbin directory. Do you have /usr/sbin? If not, it's possible that sbin was moved to tbin (for whatever reason).

 

[Dysfunction]

Yes, if you have a .bash_profile you need to use that. If you don't, it should pick up .profile. Sounds like you have a .bash_profile.