"bash: setup:command not found" error on CentOS

Question

I'm getting the folling error message when I try to use the 'setup' application on CentOS 5.5 to configure the Apache webserver.

bash: setup: command not found

However, when I tried to install it with:

yum install setup

I got the response that it was already installed and no work need to be done.

I'm logged in as root.

Any idea what the problem could be?

Many thanks

Solution 1

In case anyone else stumbles across this question, I thought I'd provide a bit of an explanation here even though it sounds like the OP is all set:

When you install a package using yum, as in:

yum install setup

You're installing a package called setup. This does not necessarily mean you're installing an application of the same name. In this case, setup is simply a low-level package that installs some necessary system configuration files. You can see the complete contents of the package like this:

rpm -ql setup

And you can get more information about the package like this:

rpm -qi setup

This includes a description of the package:

The setup package contains a set of important system configuration and setup files, such as passwd, group, and profile.

If you want to install a particular application, you can try searching for it with yum search, or if you know a particular binary name you can usually provide that as an argument to yum install. For example:

yum install /bin/zsh

You can work backwards and figure out what packages owns a particular file like this:

rpm -qf /path/to/some/file

For example:

# rpm -qf /usr/bin/ssh
openssh-clients-5.6p1-31.fc15.1.x86_64

Solution 2

May be you are looking for setuptool package

yum install setuptool

setuptool package will provide setup command for centos , fedora ,redhat & most of the rpm based distros.

Comments

[fvu]

a program can very well be installed yet not in one of the directories in the path.

[Joe]

I have tried to use the 'find' command to look for the setup file or directory, but it can't find it anywhere on the computer.

[Joe]

Thanks for the tip about using the rpm command to query. Very useful. In the end I found out what I needed to install was an application / utility called 'setuptool' which allows you to configure various things such as the firewall etc. Thanks for your help.