Lost posix utilities on Mac OSX, any ideas on debugging?

Suddenly I lost almos开发者_运维技巧t everything on the command line. I can do cd, exit and pwd...nothing else that I tried...no ls, no vi...nothing....

I do have an open terminal that's still working, but no new ones...as soon as I exit out of the current session, I'm screwed...

I was about to say I'm baffled...but I just noticed that now /etc is symlinked to /etc/private. Don't remember that being the case before...

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard...but I've rebooted since with no problems... No clue when this came about...

Any ideas on debugging it?

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It sounds like your PATH environment variable may be messed up. You may have messed it up in a .profile, .bashrc, .tcshrc, .login or similar shell startup file. Check using:

echo $PATH

Then (assuming you are using a bash shell) try setting it with:

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin

You could also try typing commands using the full path, e.g. /bin/ls. If you want to make sure that your commands are still there you should be able to use echo /bin/* /usr/bin/*.

/etc has always been a symbolic link to private/etc on Mac OS X.

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Start with echo $PATH to see what's there. Mine contains:

/Users/jleffler/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:.

On my machine, /etc is a symlink to /private/etc, and /tmp is a symlink to /private/tmp (and isn't accessible to other user IDs).

If that isn't the problem, check whether /usr/bin and /bin are available (they are not symlinked on my machine).