New to Linux

[gboyce at badbelly.com (gboyce at badbelly.com)]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Alaric wrote:

> Hi. I'm rather new to Linux and have just found the group. Being a Linux
> newbie, I've run into a couple of issues, one of which has me a bit stumped
> I just switched from Slackware to Redhat and it seems quit different, I
> can't run grep, and a number of other commands that I never had a problem
> running under slackware. is there something about Redhat that I'm missing
> entirely? In one case I was trying to run chkconfig, and was in fact looking
> at it, and it told me "file not found" this was done as a SU. I'm feeling a
> bit silly as I'm sure I'm missing the nose in front of my face on this.
> well. any help would be much appreciated as I learn my way around the
> system! Thanks!

Alaric,

When you switched from Slackware to Redhat, did you save your home 
directory by any chance?

As a few other people have mentioned, this sounds like your path statement 
isn't getting set properly.  If you are using Bash (which is the default 
in many distributions), your path statement can be set in a variety of 
ways.

Redhat's default is to setup the .bashrc file, which then includes 
/etc/bashrc.  I've never run Slackware for any extended length of time, so 
I'm not certain how they do.  However, it's possible that if your .bashrc 
left over from slackware attempts to source a file that does not exist on 
Redhat, you end up in a bad state.

Try moving or renaming .bashrc and .bash_profile from home home 
directory and copying the default Redhat version from /etc/skel.  After 
logging out and logging back in, and see if that helps. 

--
Greg Boyce