Re: Unable to start program
Joost Kooij <kooij@mpn.cp.philips.com> writes:
> 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
<SNIP>
I should point out that it is considered a bad security idea to put
"." (or in fact any directory name that doesn't begin with "/") in
root's PATH. If you're just wanting to do something one time, it
might be ok to do 'PATH=$PATH:.' as above but I wouldn't put that into
root's initialization files, or into the system-wide path. (I should
qualify this with the statement that I don't completely understand why
this is a security hole when it's done as the last component of the
PATH, but...)
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