Can't run basic CLI commands?

[rogue_mpuser]

I've never used Mint before, but I've been using Debian and OpenSuse for a few years. My wife is the Mint user, and she's pretty much a GUI only user. I'm not an expert, and in fact just wrote my first shell script, which brings me to this problem:

I wrote an automatic backup script for my wife's Mint computer. It runs fine on my OpenSUSE laptop and my debian desktop. But it uses methods like tar and scp, and apparently she doesn't have permissions to run those? The error returned when I tried to edit the script reads:

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Command 'vi' is available in '/usr/bin/vi'
The command could not be located because '/usr/bin' is not included in the PATH environment variable.

The same error appears when we try to chmod the script to make it executable, and when the script gets to the scp part.

The output of echo $PATH is:

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:/home/mj/bin:/bin

Both of those are there because I put them there, which means before I did that, there was NO path declaration. I added /bin so the chmod would work.

I know how to add directories to the path, but it seems odd to have to add paths that are normally available on other distros, so I thought I'd ask here and see if there's something about Mint that I'm not familiar with. Can a normal user run CLI commands under Mint?

[eanfrid]

I don't know what you added to her ~/.profile but all users have at least in $PATH

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/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

Sounds like you replaced the content of $PATH instead of adding to it.