Problem during change of PATH

Question

In my administrator account, from terminal I use the following command(mistakenly)

gedit ~/.pam_environment
PATH=/home/acer:$PATH
Save and close the file.
Restart the computer to initialize the new PATH variable.

After that, I can't open the account using earlier password. So can't install anything.

are you able to login using other account which can execute sudo? — Yaron, Mar 13 '17 at 07:20

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 13 '17 at 07:36

2

~/.pam_environment isn't evaluated by a shell but by the pam_env PAM module. So you can't use shell syntax like $PATH there and your $PATH is now set to literally /home/acer:$PATH so programs in /bin/, /usr/bin/, ... aren't found.

Boot into recovery mode (see How do I boot into a root shell?) and edit or remove your .pam_environment.

answered Mar 13 '17 at 07:36

Florian Diesch

87,389

I can't edit the .pam_environment during recovery mode booting? How can I do it? – BADAL Mar 13 '17 at 09:41
See How do I change file system in recovery mode to read-write mode? – Florian Diesch Mar 13 '17 at 10:17

Problem during change of PATH

1 Answers1