Comments on: Changing PATH to include /sbin or: How to fix “bash: ldconfig: command not found”

By: tordeu

tordeu — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 14:55:26 +0000

That probably happens because you are not allowed to sudo. You can do one of the following things: - become administrator with su - log in as administrator and then run call nano without sudo - enable su like explained in the following post: How to enable sudo in Linux (here: Debian Squeeze)?

By: libssh_user

libssh_user — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 11:25:58 +0000

Do we need special priveleges for editing the PATH environment variable?
When I tried I got the error : (user) is not allowed to execute ‘/usr/bin/nano /etc/profile’ as root on (localhost)

*user and localhost are place holders

By: Chunyun

Chunyun — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 20:52:56 +0000

Thank you very much! I just realized I missed the very first sentence in your original post: your system was a Debian Wheezy system. Mine is a mac and there is no ldconfig command for mac after all. Now I felt silly that I asked that question. But I’m not the one to blame. I was reading an instruction for installing imageMagick on unix system and was told to use ldconfig.
BTW, thanks for your reply. I now know how to modify the path variable

By: tordeu

tordeu — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 04:42:19 +0000

You probably just have a different linux distribution than I do (I did that on Debian Wheezy). That isn’t a problem though.

You can do one of two things:

1. Look at /etc/bashrc, PATH may be defined there

2. You can add the following two lines at the end of /etc/profile:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:$PATH
export PATH

This adds the three sbin directories to an already existing PATH variable.

By: Chunyun

Chunyun — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:01:14 +0000

Thanks for your instruction. I encountered the same problem today. However, when I opened the file, I didn’t see the same content as you described above. Instead, the file reads as follows:

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
[ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

I looked up online and it seem that this is how default /etc/profile looks like…
Should I still add the lines that you recommended regardless?

Thanks again!

By: aniketh

aniketh — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 17:34:32 +0000

I faced the same issue today, and apparently this happens because I did not update the sudoers file while doing a dist upgrade. It got fixed by adding
Defaults secure_path=”/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin”
under the Defaults line.

Got the tip from http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=69205

By: Bzt-Fzt

Bzt-Fzt — Sun, 05 May 2013 14:54:05 +0000

Very useful, thanks!