Re: A NewUser Question

From: Timothy J. Bogart (tbogart_at_frii.net)
Date: 10/22/04 

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 23:16:31 -0600

nospam>cableone.net wrote:
> Could someone please tell me is there something like a windows path file
> in Linux?? If so where. I have both Mozilla 1.7.2 and Thunderbird
> installed. When I do a Which command on either nothing is returned. The
> run ok from an icon pointed at them.
>
> Thanks
> Jim

I have avoided Windows successfully enough for the past few years to not
know what a path file is, but in *nix and OS/2 there is a PATH
environment variable which [sic] determines what is 'seen' from the
command line.

Try this

echo $PATH

and you will see the list of directories in your path.

Now, since you are in the SuSE newsgroup, I hope I can assume you are
referring to SuSE Linux when you say Linux, and further assume you did
the default KDE installation (at least). Of all the default icons I
see, there is only one for 'Office', which when you right click ->
properties -> Application , in the 'command' window you see a line that
starts with OOo.

which OOo

comes back on my system showing me where OOo is located.

I also installed Moziall 1.7.2 on my system, and grabbed it from Mozilla
directly and installed it in it's default /usr/local/mozilla. Just now,
I created an icon for it and used the 'browse' button to point to that
location. It is not in my path, but the icon has the full path.

So, I hope that makes it somewhat clear that you can run applications
(from an icon or the command line) with just the name of the application
if it can be found in your path - or, you can explicitly give the full
path to the application if it is not already included in the path.

Hope that helps.