Troubling installing OS X El Capitan through terminal and thumb drive. Problems with Terminal commands

Hello,

Please refer to the following Apple Support documents.

How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - Apple Support

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you as I've been really busy with work. I did check the location of "sudo" on one of my Macs to verify its location, but I forget exactly which location it was in (I think it was in "/usr/bin"). I'll try to double check tomorrow when I'm working on a Mac.

The Macs I'm currently working on are all managed so I cannot be sure the $PATH is the macOS default. The value of $PATH for this managed Mac was: "/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin".

also when I run:

find / -iname sudo 2>/dev/null

I get my original prompt:

-bash-3.2#

It seems you don't have a copy of "sudo" on your Mac for whatever reason.

Can you boot into Recovery Mode using Command + R? Maybe you can create the USB installer while in Recovery Mode. I don't know if this is possible since Recovery Mode doesn't include access to all the utilities which may be needed to create the USB installer.

I would highly recommend you have a good backup of your data and try to reinstall macOS over top of itself from Recovery Mode. Just make sure you are reinstalling the same version of macOS or a newer version. If this is successful, then you can try to create the USB installer again.

Quit the Terminal and relaunch it. Double-check you have the default path by running the command:

echo  $PATH

If you have the default path listed, then run the following command to see if you can locate "sudo":

find  /  -iname  sudo  2>/dev/null



Explanation of the above command: The "find" command will search the whole boot drive ("/") for "sudo" irrespective if any of the characters are upper or lower case ("-iname") and will get rid of any error messages ("2>/dev/null").

I'm not at a Mac right now, but "sudo" should be located in one of these locations: "/bin", "/sbin", "/usr/bin", or "/usr/sbin".

Before running any commands from the Internet you really should research what they are doing to get a general idea of what will happen. You can always get more information about a command using "man" to get the manual pages for a command, or by using the "-h" or "--help" option with the command to get a summary help information about the command. For example to get more information about "sudo":

man  sudo
sudo  -h
sudo  --help

Are you running any anti-virus, security, or cleaning apps which may be interfering with the normal operation of the Mac?