- Why can't I use traceroute or ping in my shell account? I get the message "command not found"
You have them, they're just not in your path, which consists of the directories that the OS searches through to find a program every time you run that program.
ping is in /sbin
traceroute is in /usr/sbin
Your shell is most likely set to be tcsh, so you add this to your .cshrc:
setenv PATH /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
If you use bash, add this to your .bash_profile:
export PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin
You can type either command at the prompt to get it working immediately, but you need to make the changes described above in order for it to take effect every time you login.