why does terminal say "no file or directory" in downloads wheni do chmod (unbutu)

davidnozepress · 11-15-2020, 10:43 PM

sudo chmod +x /home/path/to/the/file/OptiFine.jar
is what i have and it says
chmod: cannot access '/home/path/to/the/file/OptiFine.jar': No such file or directory

berndbausch · 11-15-2020, 11:58 PM

My guess is that you mistype the file path. What do you get when you execute the following command?

Code:

sudo ls -l /home/path/to/the/file/OptiFine.jar

GazL · 11-16-2020, 04:35 AM

Do you really need sudo here? If the file is in your own ~/Downloads directory it shouldn't be necessary.

davidnozepress · 11-16-2020, 07:20 PM

/home/compudopt/Downloads/OptiFine_1.16.4_HD_U_G5 (1).jar

berndbausch · 11-17-2020, 06:33 AM

This shows that you have to be precise when asking questions and not provide approximate commands.

Is there a space in the filename? If so, put quotes around the filename or a backslash before the space.

sgosnell · 11-17-2020, 11:13 AM

OptiFine_1.16.4_HD_U_G5 (1).jar is not the same as OptiFine.jar. There are several ways of dealing with this.
One is:

Code:

chmod +x /home/compudopt/Downloads/OptiFine{tab}

which means type the start of the filename and then press the Tab key, which will autocomplete the filename, or at least to the first variance if there are multiple files with similar names. Or you can be even less specific and use

Code:

chmod +x /home/compudopt/Downloads/OptiFine*

which will make every file in the directory which starts with OpiFine executable.

rknichols · 11-17-2020, 11:14 AM

Parentheses are also special to the shell. File names containing spaces and other special characters need to be quoted on the command line:

Code:

ls /home/compudopt/Downloads/"OptiFine_1.16.4_HD_U_G5 (1).jar"

It's just the special characters that really need quoting, but including more in the quotes is fine.

The quick solution is to type the first few characters of the name (enough to match uniquely) and then press <tab> to let the shell complete the name in a syntactically correct way.