Linux weird problem touch : command not found?
Solution 1
You probably temporarily messed up your path. It may be enough to do:
exec /bin/bash
Then you can try touch
, etc. to make sure things are normal.
If that doesn't work, the PATH definition is wrong in one of your system files.
Solution 2
I made the mistake of overriding my PATH in a script;
while read -r PATH; do
touch "${PATH}";
done < <(git diff-tree --no-commit-id --name-only -r "${COMMIT_ID}")
The read -r PATH
bit cleared the path to the touch binary.
Fix was a simple rename:
while read -r GIT_PATH; do
Solution 3
Try to find the command manually. It will be a file named touch and on my current system it is /bin/touch. You can find it by with locate touch or even find / -name touch. If you find it with locate and it isn't where it says that it should be, that could mean that it was recently moved or deleted.
Once you find the command, make sure that it is in your PATH with echo $PATH. If all this works, try specifying the path and command together (i.e. /bin/touch foo). You may also want to check your aliases to see if there is anything there messing things up.
As an observation, you mention that vi isn't working either. In my system, both vi and touch are in /bin and not /usr/bin. Check to see if you are able to run other commands from there.
user3649503
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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user3649503 over 1 year
I occurred a really weired problem, which is touch : command not found.
I was going to create a blank file, so I type the touch command which didn't work.
I'm running centOS 5.
Any ideas?
BTW: the vi command also not found.
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Admin about 14 yearsType
echo $PATH
, what do you see? Or try "/bin/echo $PATH"
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Admin about 14 yearsit tells me: "-bash: type: touch: not found"
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Kamil Maciorowski over 2 yearsIn general you should choose lowercase (or at least not-all-uppercase) names. If
GIT_PATH
was an environment variable (e.g. exported in/etc/profile
) that matters for some tool you're going to use, then the tool could misbehave. Withgit_path
you should be safer from such mishaps because sane tools use uppercase names for variables. Not entirely safe though, e.g.zsh
usespath
along withPATH
. Picking a safe name takes some knowledge of your environment and your shell.