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gr33kbo1
Asked: 2013-09-20 17:51:11 +0800 CST

Trying to use symbolic link gives me "command not found" error

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I created a symbolic link via ln -s pathname/folder/file.py whatever and I now have a bright blue link in my home directory with the symbolic link command name but when I try whatever hello_world, it's giving me an error saying whatever: command not found.

What I want to do works when I re-type out the pathname and file but the symbolic link seems to be doing nothing....which means I did something wrong

symbolic-link

2 Answers

  1. That is likely nothing to do with symbolic links per se - it is probably because by default the shell does not search the current directory for executable files (regardless of whether they are regular files or symbolic links) - if you add the relative path to whatever i.e.

    ./whatever

    it should work.

    • 4

  2. You should make sure that the path which contains the sym link is in PATH enviroment variable

    echo $PATH

    or use ./whatever

    to add the path to your $PATH edit .bashrc (It will specific for the current user if you want to be for all users edit /etc/profile) and add:

    PATH=$PATH:pathname/folder/
export $PATH

    then save and exit and run

    source .bashrc
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