Hello everyone!

Just wondering why Redhat 8.0 refuses to execute most standard linux commands. On trying the following commands(ifconfig, init 0 or shutdown), Redhat returns "bash: <command>: command not found".

I say what the heal is Redhat saying? If a linux machine can't execute these commands, which OS then? I understand these commands are standard and should work with all Linux distributions. I tried them on SUSE and they worked alright.

What am I doing wrong? Do I need to be in a specific directory to execute particular commands? I know most commands need root
rights.

thanks for your help.

Have you tried su to root and running the commands? If not, try that. The path to the commands may also not be in your path environment variable.

Most distros don't add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the user path. It is on the root path, however.

Try running /sbin/shutdown or /sbin/ifconfig. That will work. You do need to be root (sudo is my favorite way)

really sounds like a permissions problem. try to run these commands as root. if this works, and you use these commands often as a normal user look into suid/gid and sudo

I always run commands as root but they refuse to work. I tried running ifconfig from the directories suggested by crichards, but still get ''bash: ifconfig: command not found". I also tried to run init 6 but failed. The only commands that worksout on my machine are: reboot and halt. For all other commands, it fails.

How do I go about adding the path in the environment variable?

chmod +x /sbin/whatever.

Then try running it.

check what you're path is:
"$PATH"

also, the path is not the problem if the command does not run at all. Did you try a full path? (ie. /sbin/shutdown)

well
$echo $PATH
prints you the current path
if you want to add extra path such as /usr/sbin
then type
$export PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
to see your current environmental variables(one of which is path)
type
$env
keep posted