Can not do anything in terminal

Question

I was trying to install a new program from this website using Fink
http://schloss.micro.umass.edu/mothur/Installing_ARB
I was doing great until I had to change the .profile
I changed the .profile by doing
pico -w .profile
and adding the following lines
ARBHOME=/sw/share/arb; export ARBHOME
LDLIBRARYPATH=/sw/share/arb/lib; export LDLIBRARYPATH
PATH=/sw/bin:${PATH}; export PATH
There was already one line in the .profile. I forget what it was but I put these lines in front of it.
Now I can do nothing in terminal. All I get is command not found. I can copy, delete, rm etc. for example it will say
-bash: rm: command not found
If anyone could help me it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Create a new admin account, log in to it, open a terminal, do "sudo bash", then copy the new admin account's .profile over to the other account.
Next time, when editing login files, always test them with a new terminal window while you still have one or more terminal windows open. That way, you can easily fix problems like this.