"ls: not found" after running "read PATH"
The variable name PATH
is already reserved for a different purpose: It lists all the possible locations searched to find commands not built into the shell.
ls
is such a command. Thus, when you change the value of PATH
, you change the way the shell tries to look for the ls
executable; unless the new value of PATH
includes a directory with a ls
executable in it, any further attempts to run ls
(or other commands not built into the shell) will fail.
Instead, use a different variable name -- ideally, including at least one lower-case character, to avoid conflict with (all-uppercase) builtins and environment variables.
Thus, one corrected form might be:
#!/system/bin/sh
echo "enter directory for listing"
IFS= read -r path
ls -R -- "$path" > list.txt
Note that the -R
is moved before the "$path"
in this case -- while GNU systems will allow optional arguments to be after positional arguments, many older UNIX systems will only treat flags (like -R
) as valid if they're found before the first non-flag/option argument.