04 Mar 10 ifconfig not working CentOS

I just finished installing CentOS 5.4 on my computer and wanted to check my network settings so I ran ifconfig and it came back with command not found I tried running ethtool same results. I was confused for a while why this is happening. Because every time I installed Linux before these commands always worked.

Well after doing some digging I realized that the path to /sbin wasn’t in my user profile not even as root. Simple way to find this out is by using the following command:
echo $PATH

Weird, but any ways I used the following method to add /sbin to my user profile so that I can run these commands easily. Now for security reasons of course you don’t want to give all users access to these commands.

export PATH=$PATH:/sbin


After typing this command as root and as myself I was able to use the ifconfig and ethtool commands without typing the full path to them (/sbin/ifconfig or /sbin/ethtool).

Tags: add /sbin to user profile, adding path to sbin, ifconfig not working linux, ifconfig not working on CentOS