MacOS – Terminal: “Invalid Argument: dirname” (El Capitan)

bashmacosterminal

I noticed the issue when I first went to run

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

in OS X Terminal (10.11.2) but this was returned

bash: /usr/bin/defaults: Invalid argument

I'm not sure what is going on with defaults, but I also have a similar issue with brew:

/bin/bash: /usr/bin/dirname: Invalid argument

I clearly broke something (or perhaps malware), but not sure how I did it or when it happened. This is causing all sorts of issues. Any thoughts on fixing it?

My PATH variable looks like this:

/Users/username/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/MacGPG2/bin:/usr/texbin:/Users/username/.rvm/bin

EDIT:
I noticed my issue is similar to this one: OS X Yosemite Hard Disk Errors even after Repairing them but there's no resolution.

Best Answer

Found a solution! I reinstalled El Capitan from the recovery partition (hold command-R while restarting). The errors are now gone.

Related Solutions

Many programs notify me that “grep/sed/uname/… not found”; some run, some don’t. My system(?) path is damaged, how to go about a diagnosing it

Your question is unclear as it seems to ask several things. However the issue re launching from the Dock can be answered.

The Dock does not call a shell. .profile and other startup scripts are only run when Terminal.app or similar starts a shell or you run a shell script via launchd etc.

To change the path used for Apps launched from the Dock, Finder or other GUI then you need to change the path your Workspace uses this is in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist e.g. mine is

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>WAFDIR</key>
  <string>/Users/mark/src/third_party/git-svn/waf</string>

  <key>PATH</key>
  <string>/Users/mark/bin:/Users/mark/env/bin:/Users/mark/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/libexec/binutils:</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Also have a look at this question.

MacOS – OS X Lion thesterious user cron job just does echo “PATH is $PATH”

launchd holds files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents for individual users.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Many programs notify me that “grep/sed/uname/… not found”; some run, some don’t. My system(?) path is damaged, how to go about a diagnosing it

MacOS – OS X Lion thesterious user cron job just does echo “PATH is $PATH”

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