Hello everyone, I have a question related to the installation of gdrive.

I am following the tutorial located at this address:
https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive

On my system, the file gdrive-linux-arm64 has to be downloaded.
Afterward, this file has to be converted as an executable, following this text:

"Download gdrive from one of the links below. On unix systems run chmod +x gdrive after download to make the binary executable. The first time gdrive is launched (i.e. run gdrive about in your terminal not just gdrive)"

So, does it mean that the command has to be typed to execute the file? Or is it the command ? Both are actually not working in my case.

A more general question: What command activate an executable file?

This is a very general description of an error. Can you be more precise? How do you know it's not working? What do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?

To execute, i.e. run, a file, it needs to fulfill a few conditions.

It must be in an executable format. That seems to be the case here.
It must have the execution flag set. The chmod command takes care of that.
It must be placed in a location where the system finds it. I suspect this is the crux in your case.

Like Windows, UNIX and Linux have a so-called execution path, a list of all the directories (Windows term: folders) that will be searched when a program is to be executed. If your program is not in one of those directories, it can't be executed just by typing its name.

You have two choices. Either move the file to a place where it can be executed. The execution path is in the variable PATH; to display it:
The second choice is providing the file's directory path. If the file is named gdrive and resides in your home directory, you can do this:
or that
Oh, and the third choice is to add the directory where the file resides to the PATH. Not necessarily a good choice though, so I won't explain how it's done.

Hello berndbausch, thanks for your answer!

In this case the path or file location is not in cause, as I am located in the directory containing the executable file.

Even though, I have tried different approaches:

or

In both cases the result is "command not found"

Does it mean that my file is actually not executable, or that I have to use a command to run it?

What is the output of
?

And how did the arm file from your original post turn into an x64 file?

The instructions you posted said to run so, from within the directory where the file gdrive is located
or, from elsewhere
To follow on to berndbausch's suggestion, let us see

In windows probably it works, but in Linux by default the current dir is not in the search PATH, so executables cannot be found even in the current directory - if it was not explicitly set.

that means the directory is not looked for executables, so you need to tell the os where are they located.
That's why you need to specify a directory (relative or absolute) as it was suggested.

But we still do not know what was actually and exactly made, so hard to tell you the exact solution. Tthat's why we want to se the result of:

Thank you all for your suggestions and support.

Please forget the "gdrive-linux-arm64" file, I have mistyped the file name from the Github page.

Using the following command:
It yields this line:
However, using:

I got information on the googledrive account targeted, although it is not running the file.
Would you have any idea why? Are the commands not supposed to be before the filename, and not after?

Now that you have it running/working, you need to go back to the documentation to learn how to use it. We don't need to read that for you.

Running it with the about option is probably doing what it's supposed to do.

The tutorial quote that a password and a verification code were requested, and I was wondering why it didn't showed up in my case.

After further inquiries, it seems that another user on my machine has already entered the code, so I found my answer here.

Now, the logic of having the "about" command after the filename when all the other commands are supposed to come first, it still escapes me.

What other commands?

about is a parameter of the gdrive command. On the command line, a parameter comes after the command. If you typed
you would run a command named about with a parameter gdrive.