How to fix "ls: command not found" error in Linux

Why did Linux server refuse the command ?

When we use linux server like XSERVER through SSH connection, we usually use these commands like ls and vi.

But one day your server would refuse your command, and you may see the error below.

bash: ls: command not found

What is root cause of this error.

How to find root cause without commands like ls.

So today I will introduce how to fix "ls: command not found" error in Linux.

Author

Mid-carieer engineer (AI, system). Good at Python and SQL. Through system engineer experience, I also have a lot of knowledge like server.

Reason of "ls: command not found" error

Reason of "ls: command not found" error is that PATH settings is broken.

Because of broken PATH settings, server can not find program of input command.
So server said "command not found".

Then can I run comannd with full path ?

Yes. If server has program, you can run the command.

So you can run command with full path.

It depends on environment.

In XSERVER, you can run ls command with /usr/bin/ls.

How to fix error

Now we understand cause of error.

Then how can we fix the error ?

Path settings is in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_profile.
(In case of that default shell is bash.)

So you can see and fix that content.

In order to open file, you can use this command.

/usr/bin/vi ~/.bash_profile

When I found this error, ~/.bash_profile was like below.

Cause is read area.

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
export PATHeval $(/home/xxxx/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)

This text should have line break between export PATH and eval.
(Maybe I did mistake when I installed linuxbrew.)

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
export PATH
eval $(/home/xxxx/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)

So modify it then you can solve "command not found" error.

Conclusion

Today I introduced How to fix "ls: command not found" error in Linux.

Reason of "command not found" error is that PATH settings is broken.

In this case, you can use full path like /usr/bin/ls .

In order to solve this error, you should open ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_profile with /usr/bin/vi command.
And modify path settings.

Knowledge about Linux is very important for web engineer.

These GCP,AWS,OracleVM, XSERVER serve Linux server.

So it is good to learn linux.

There are related articles like ssh connection to linux server and how to install.