I have an executive program that I need to run at the command prompt; how do I do it...

should run if I double click it, but is not doing it... I wanna try command line

Do you mean "executable" rather than "executive"?

If so you need to make sure the permissions (and ownership/group) are correct for the user that is attempting to run the command.

e.g. If a file is to be executed by only root then it should have root as the owner and have the execute bit set for owner.
chown root <file>
chmod 700 <file> (if a script)
-OR-
chmod 500 <file> (if a binary)

You can see current permissions, ownership and group with the ls command:
ls -l <file>

You can get more details with the man command for each of the above commands:

man ls
man chmod
man chown

is so late at night here... that I misspelled that word...

tried it on root and didn't run...

is a patch file and I allowed it to be executed under my user name and tried it under
root and it didn't run... But I double click the file... some files under the right permission will run like that...this one didn't and that's why I need to know how to run it on the terminal....

make sure you are in the right directory and type./program

AceofSpades19 you mean ./patch?

patch is the file I need to install

Expanding on that - the "./" says "in this directory". This way you are sure the command can be found if the directory where it is isn't in your PATH variable.

You can see what's in that variable by typing:
echo $PATH
each directory will be separated by a colon.

If the file is named "patch" and you are in the directory where the file "patch" is then "./patch" should work so long as it is executable.

AceofSpades19 and jlightner thanks for the help...

I as you said... from the terminal I cd to the installed dir and did ./patch

the script ran just as expected.....

thank guys.... still I think I am new to Linux!!!!!!!

No problem