What does "is not recognized as an internal or external command" error mean?
I would spin up a second VM taking careful note of the version of the installer you used to build it up (or document from where you got the VM image). For example, the Install OS X El Capitan installer dated October 12, 2015 installs build 15B41a of the OS.

After the first boot, document which command-line tools are broken. You don't need to sign in to the app store or install Xcode to run xcode-select --install as that should be bundled with the core OS.

As I commented, massive amounts of breakage is present if the following commands don't run:


ls
whoami


You can run the type command to make sure you at least have a viable set of these commands:

mac:~ me$ type ls
ls is /bin/ls
mac:~ me$ type xcode-select
xcode-select is /usr/bin/xcode-select
mac:~ me$ file `which ls`
/bin/ls: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64