Sometime when you modify .bashrc or .bash_profile and source it, you may notice that you have ‘lost’ your shell commands.
You will see ‘command not found’ for the simplest commands such as ls
and which
.
Most like this happens because you have accidentally override your PATH. So instead of doing:
PATH=my/custom/path:$PATH
, you did PATH=my/custom/path
.
Here’s a simpel way to fix it.
echo 'PATH=/bin:/usr/bin' > foo && source foo
This will get recover your commands so you can modify your .bashrc or .bash_profile with nano. Remember to back up a working version before working on them next time :)