sudo: command not found

Sounds like your PATH environment variable may be messed up.

/usr/bin/sudo # is where the sudo command is stored

These are the directories that should be in a default user account's PATH:

/usr/bin

/bin

/usr/sbin

/sbin

You can use either of these commands to see your PATH

echo $PATH

or an easier to read output using:

echo $PATH|awk '{gsub(/:/,"\n") ;print}'

So do you have one of the following files?

/bin/ls $HOME/.bash_profile

/bin/ls $HOME/.bash_login

/bin/ls $HOME/.bashrc

/bin/ls $HOME/.profile

By default, none of these files exist, but when someone reports they cannot execute some command that should be on every Mac, it is very common that they have one of the above files and it has a mistake that does not modify the PATH environment variable correctly.

From terminal type:

echo $PATH

You should see a list of all the directories (separated by colons) where the shell looks for commands to execute when you type something. For my system the list is:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin

The sudo command is in /usr/bin

To see that the file is there and what its ownership and permissions are type:

ls -l /usr/bin/sudo

For my system:

-r-s--x--x
1 root
wheel
370704 Oct 26 15:00 /usr/bin/sudo

The sudo command with those permissions works for me. If yours are different, you may have found the "root" cause. 🙂

If Disk Utility offers "Repair Permissions" on your system, that may fix the problem. If not, you'll probably have to use chmod from the terminal.

Best,

Dan

The error message for the command from Bob means the system is not finding the awk command either.

Looks like your $PATH variable is not the problem. Could be you don't have permissions for your account to use one or more of the key directories or commands. Try to list the files in each of the directories in your path with:

ls -a [name of the directory here]

Make sure they all have commands in them. See if you can spot "awk" or "sudo" anywhere. If any of the command directories shows as "not found" by the ls command, that's your problem. It could be "not found" because it's not there or because you don't have permission to browse it.

Use "ls -alF" in your home directory to see if any of the files Bob mentioned are present. Chances are they would have wrecked things by messing up the $PATH variable.

You might also try:

1) Use DiskUtility "First Aid" on the SSD

2) In the Terminal application, close completely out of the current shell with "control-D" (may require multiple contol-D commands, if multiple shells have been spawned. Then open a new terminal window to create a fresh shell environment and see if "sudo ls -a" will work.