Hey All,

I'm a Slackware noob who's trying to figure out how to install new programs so that all I have to do is type in their executables to launch them (like from xterm).

For example, I downloaded and unzipped Mozilla Firefox to a directory within /opt. It runs fine when I go to /opt/firefox and type "firefox", but not from any other location.

Know what I mean?

yeah, well, if your executable is in some dir and can only be started by "going" there first, then the executable isn't in your path so one solution would be to create a symlink to your path pointing to the executable, like this:

let's say you have a program called run.sh in /home/name/run/. now you can only start it by either cd'ing to /home/name/run/ and running it or by typing /home/name/run/run.sh - the trick to make it runnable "from any place" is this: let's make a symlink to, say, /usr/bin with a command like this:

ln -s /home/name/run/run.sh /usr/bin/run

after this you would just type "run" (without quotes) no matter "where" you are, to run the program from /home/name/run/. simple as that so just do a "ln -s /the/path/to/executable /usr/bin/appname" without quotes. got it?

Hey, rock on!

You made my day.

One more thing - does this also mean that all programs installed to /usr/bin are runnable from anyplace?

As long as it is in your path:

echo $PATH

To change do a:
export PATH=$PATH:/more/directories:/to/add/here:/seperated/by/colon

just as bulliver said

swell. Thanks!