Home / ubuntu / Questions / 176679
Accepted
Nirmik
Asked: 2012-08-17 08:53:55 +0800 CST

How to find the executable file of an app if 'whereis' is not showing it?

  • 772

This basically to do with cuttlefish(The app from showdown) in this case.

I cant find the location of the executable file for it.

The command whereis did not give any results!

I want to add it to my start up applications and thus i need the path!

P.S: the preferences of the app are not showing up and ticking against the start automatically thing when the settings for the 1st time showed up is not working!.

So i need to find out the executable/bin file...

How do i do this?

command-line

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use apt-file search <package-name> or dpkg -S <package-name>, where <package-name> is the package you want to search.

    Note that these commands will output many results. To find the required package use grep:

    apt-file search package | grep -E "(bin/)?package$"

    OR

    dpkg -S package | grep -E "(bin/)?package$"

    This searches the lines whose last word is package and may or may not be preceded by bin/, for example it will result both /usr/bin/package and /usr/anydirectory/package.

    • 6

  2. Another quick way to find executable programs is to use locate, which will only show those programs present on your computer. It relies on a database that is automatically updated by cron every day. (Use sudo updatedb to refresh it manually if you have just installed some programs and cannot find them when using locate.)

    If, for example, you wanted to find where the dosbox executable is, simply type:

    locate dosbox | grep bin

    Which returns,

    /usr/bin/dosbox

    Apart from using whereis, this is the quickest way to find executables. It can also be used to find readme documents extremely quickly by substituting bin for README.

    Locate is a very useful program and you can even use regex with it if you want to conduct more complex searches. See man locate for more details.

    • 2

  3. Some other commands which (similar to the whereis) can tell you where the executable is (all of them detailed in answers to this question) are summarized here:

    1. type: type <name> (shell builtin)
    2. command: command -v <name> (shell builtin)
    3. find
    • 2