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Re: Unable to start program



On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Gabrie van Zanten wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Sometimes I see a program (I think) but I can't run it, even though I'm
> using root. Like this one:
> -rwxr-xr-x  XF86_S3V   2043768
> 
> I thought I could at least run it and get an error, but Linux says: command
> not found. I had this too when installing fortune. After logging in as a
> user I could run fortune, but not before as root (fortune was in the users
> PATH, does it matter?).

If its not in your $PATH, the shell won't find it. Unix, unlike dos, does
not automatically consider the current directory ( $PWD ) to be part of
$PATH, unless you explicitly set it so ( eg. add a dot to $PATH like so: 
export PATH=$PATH:. )

If you type ./commandname that will always work, because the shell sees an
absolute path prepended to the command, just like as if you had typed
/home/userx/somedir/command

Of course, the commandname file must have the execution bit set ( chmod +x
commandname )

Cheers,


Joost


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