[tex-live] What is wrong with my tex?

[Timothy Legg]

Hello,

I installed TeX Live on my Debian system using the install-tl.tar.gz provided on http://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire.html

Aside from the script not appending my $PATH (which I fixed manually), there still seems to be something wrong.  Does anybody recognize this problem?  I swear this worked when I installed a similar distribution of TeX about 6 years ago...

legg at debian:~$ tex sample.tex 
This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (Web2C 7.5.7)
(./sample.tex
! Undefined control sequence.
l.6 \documentclass
                  {article}      % Specifies the document class
? 


Thanks!

Tim