Mac终端错误-bash：找不到命令-El Capitan 10.11.13

Question

I'm getting an error message when I first open my Mac terminal -

-bash: Applications: command not found

Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), when I open another tab, I sometimes get a different error -

-bash: README.md: command not found

or

-bash: [: missing `]'

I just noticed that this morning... there are two things that I did last night that I feel may have led to this, but I'm not sure if I am correct, nor do I know how to appropriately fix this issue. My OS is El Capitan 10.11.13.

First off, last night, I used Homebrew to install PostGIS 2.2 - my Postgres version is 9.5.1.

Second, I made a Github pull request for one of my projects (I'm not sure how a pull request could upset my bash profile, but Github's standard readme format is README.md, so I thought I'd better mention this here).

My bash profile seems clean to me -

[[ -s "$HOME/.profile" ]] && source "$HOME/.profile" # Load the default .profile
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function
export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin
*    #EDITED TO INCLUDE THIS ASTERISK, WHICH I NEGLECTED BEFORE

Can anyone shed some light on what happened and how I can go about fixing this? I'm fairly new to using the terminal, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret this.

Answer 1

How to troubleshoot Bash startup problems :

To build on Jonathan Leffler's helpful comment :

• From an existing terminal window, run script log.txt bash -lxv
  • This will create a new login ( -l ) shell (which is the type of shell Terminal.app on OSX creates by default) and log all its startup activities.
  • In addition to capturing regular output,
    • -v shows unexpanded source lines as they're being read.
    • -x shows the expanded, individual commands that are executed, prefixed with + .
• Execute exit to terminate that shell, which will save everything that was just printed to log.txt .
• Study file log.txt to see what's going on.

---

What turned out to be the OP's problem:

• A stray * on a single line in their profile expanded to an alphabetically sorted list of the names of the files and folders in the then-current directory (a process called pathname expansion or globbing).

  • Not only is a * as its own command (or the start of a command) not useful , it could result in unwanted execution of a command (see below).

• Bash then tried to execute the result of this expansion as a command to execute , with the 1st word (whitespace-separated token) interpreted as the command name .

  • This failed, because that first word happened not be a command name.
  • However, if the first word happened to be a valid command name such as file , that command would execute .
    (Unless the current dir. happens to be in the $PATH , it doesn't matter whether the first matching filename is an executable file or not - all that matters is whether the name matches an existing command name).

• On startup, the user's home dir. was the working dir.; by contrast, opening another tab later uses the then-current working dir., whatever it happens to be.

  • This explains the differing symptoms, as globbing in different directories will typically result in different name lists, the respective first word of which Bash will try to execute.

Answer 2

Thanks to everyone's help here, I was able to resolve this issue. When I posted my question, I left a tiny but important detail out of my bash profile - a lone asterisk on the last line.

[[ -s "$HOME/.profile" ]] && source "$HOME/.profile" # Load the default .profile

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function

export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin  #ADDS MYSQL TO PATH EVERY TIME TERMINAL OPENS
*

I didn't even notice this thing before, let alone understand that it was doing anything. I commented it out and now everything runs perfectly. I'm not sure if this asterisk is a standard part of the bash profile or not, but if it has been there all along, it didn't cause me any trouble until this morning, after I had installed PostGIS and made a Github pull request. I'm not sure why those actions would have triggered this problem, but I'm trying to be as descriptive as possible in case anyone else runs into this.