BASH - Weird Problems with Shell

Odd problems with no apparent cause?

[Nick_W]

Hi all,

recently my RH8 systems BASH shell has been acting very weird and I can't for the life of me work out where/what is wrong.

It constanly shows "dircolors: Command not found" on launch.

It has lost the use of the 'clear' command. (with same error msg when I try it.

Can someone tell me a) How I might go about fixing it. b) What may cause such an oddity.

Most gratefull for any suggestions...

Nick

[Duckula]

Can you run 'dircolors' from the prompt? It should be at /usr/bin/dircolors.

Have you had a crash, lost data?

[Nick_W]

Ahhhh....

Only get man entries with whereis dircolors or clear...

I did have a crash, I'm sure something is wrong with my HD (this has happend before) - I ran fsck manually and had to abort it after i'd left a bottle of water holding down the enter key fixing millions of empty inodes...

Must have lost some programs I guess?

Sidenote: When I try to fsck or scandisk in Win I get a 'scraping' "ssshhh ssshhh shhhh" noise before it aborts. Could a badly partitioned disk cause this?

Cheers!

Nick

[andreasfriedrich]

>>'scraping' "ssshhh ssshhh shhhh" noise

That noise started about two days before my hd finally stopped working at all :(

Andreas

[dingman]

Yup. That noise is your hard disk saying "it's about time for you to copy anything you need some place else."

[Nick_W]

I've only had it about 2yrs. If it's on everyday is that a reasonable time for it to pack up?

Nick

[dingman]

The computer to my right has had the same HD since I bought it in 1997. (Well, the original one is still there, at any rate. There are three newer ones as well.) In that time, it has been turned off only when I was moving or out of the country, and not always even then. So two years certainly isn't my expected lifetime for a hard drive.

On the other hand, I've certainly seen HDs die much younger. I've personally had the most trouble with Maxtors, but I have not conducted anything like a scientific study, and it's a brand that's ubiquitous over here 'cause you can buy them cheap at any office supply store. There are also just occasionally bad drives that make it out of the factory to fail in the field. I'm generally a Seagate fan, but I can't say I've never had to replace one of those that failed young, either.

[Nick_W]

The odd thing is that this only happens when I run a 'thorough scandisk' in win or fsck in Linux.

Never during normall operations?

Nick