SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes

Paths

As was just mentioned, a path tells the shell where to look for programs that you want to execute. You might notice that if you have a copy of a program in your current directory, typing the filename sometimes results in a command not found error. This is because it's common for the path variable to lack the current directory. A good way to simulate this problem is to type the following:

					> \(-
					> (-: Command not found
				

In addition to getting a nice smiley face you can see that there is no command found for this entry. All this means is that you either don't have a path or you don't have a command. You can execute programs in the current directory by typing ./<program> or by adding the current directory to your path. The current directory ...