terminal command

[charactermatter]

Is there a way to tell the command to run a program by looking at something in the files? For instance, Firefox in a terminal launches firefox. That one is easy to figure out and you could get it if you didn't already know just by taking a wild guess. Some programs don't seem to be so straightforward. So, is there a way I can tell by looking at the pakage or a particular file that tells me what the command line to launch it is?

[ozjd]

One way is to look at the menu editor and see the command used there but the better way is to view the man page for that package.
The command is "man packagename " Most man entries will give you details on how to start the package as well as the options available.

[charactermatter]

Thanks for a simple solution. I suppose I should have thought about reading the instructions, but that gene is recessive...

[vallimar]

Nearly all *nix programs support "-h" or "--help" to provide a brief (sometimes not) usage summary and options listing.

Originally Posted by vallimar

Nearly all *nix programs support "-h" or "--help" to provide a brief (sometimes not) usage summary and options listing.

He's asking (IIUC) how to find the name of the executable. The --help option is of little help there ;-)


As for the OP's question: the only way to know what executables are installed by a package is to look in the package file list. For example, say you want to know what executable files are installed by the firefox package. One way to get a list of everything installed by the package is:

rpm -q --list firefox

That will produce a long list (319 files), but very very few of them are actually executable files. One way to filter out the support files is to look in that long list for files which are put in the /usr/bin directory, where essentiall all executables are put. You can do that by running

rpm -q --list firefox | grep ^/usr/bin

Now the list is much shorter: it has exactly one item.

Be aware, though, that some of the Fedora packages install lots of executables. An example is the coreutils package, which provides 64, as you can see from running:

rpm -q --list coreutils| grep ^/usr/bin | wc -l

[PabloTwo]

Originally Posted by Mariano Suárez-

rpm -q --list coreutils| grep ^/usr/bin | wc -l

Good advice. But that example misses the two executables that land in /sbin/ from the coreutils package, and fails to print the list itself. To catch all the executables, regardless of which "bin" they are in, better to use, as an example:

rpm -ql coreutils | grep bin/

The " | wc -l " only prints a Word Count of the resulting list and the list is not seen.

The command only prints the number because, as I said, the command was used to see how many such executables there are. In other words, the command does not print the list itself because it was not intended to.

OTOH, I chose to ignore what's put in other places simply because those other executables are not intended to be run by the user in normal situations---that is why the sbin directories do not show up in default PATHs, for example; as another example, some packages but executables in /usr/libexec, too, but it makes little sense to include them...

I did miss the ones in /bin, though (regular, non-system, packages should not put anything there, so it is no big loss for user packages, like firefox's)

[charactermatter]

Thank you all for your posts. I like reading tricks and tips from the pros.