While I was adding Golang to the PATH my terminal (Konsole) suddenly stopped recognizing basic commands like nano and ls. I restared my PC and after logging back in (X11) KDE started throwing errors because it wasn’t able to find any program I tried to launch. Konsole is gone. I can’t open any program whatsoever (Firefox, Discover etc.). Trying to log in into Wayland just throws a black screen. After a few more reatarts I decided to use the terminal from the login screen, but it is broken as well. ls not found, nano and vim don’t exist. So far I can use pwd and cd.
What the hell is wrong here? Is it hardware failure (bad SSD)? Is there anything I can attempt to recover the system?
It definitely could be a hardware failure, but if the system still boots fine, it’s probably not that. Based on the symptoms, I think you might have clobbered your PATH variable. This can happen when you do something like
PATH=/new/path/because the variable gets overwritten. You have to remember to preserve the existing value withPATH=$PATH:/new/path/. Don’t worry, this is reversible.The best thing to do would be to fix or temporarily remove the commands you used to set PATH in whatever profile or .rc file it’s in. You can run whatever text editor you have installed by specifying the path to the executable. I don’t know exactly where vim is on Fedora, but it’s probably something similar to
/sbin/vimor/usr/bin/vim. Keep trying locations until you find the right one. Then log out and back in and it should be fixed.You might also be able to login as root and use the shell normally to fix the problem, depending on which file contains the faulty command. Hopefully this helps.