Okay, I am newbie frustrated.

I can never find anything in the directory structures. I know I have Apache, MySQL, PHP installed and I am trying to configure the PHP MySQL Libraries but I can't figure out where this stuff is intstalled! All the books I read say it is either here or there, but it is never where they say it should be. What is the best way to find stuff when you have no idea what directory/folder it is in?

Use the programs "find" or "locate". "man find" or "man locate" for help.

Okay... I type

cd /
find php

nothing. I am pretty sure I have php as I can run phpinfo() in a script and get output.

Are there wildcards or something? I can't seem to see any in the man page...

- feeling stupid here

can you not run a find from x - like Kfind in KDE ?

Huh? Run a find from x? I am stitting at the command line right now.

I stopped running a GUI as it was more frustrating due to the fact that the books I am reading all refer to command lines...

Okay, so I ran KDE and found KFind and have discovered that I have 2 files named php. Now I am going to search for configure. But I still want to know why find did not work from the command prompt.

I am by no means any expert here, but what you should use is locate php from command line to find any file with php in it. This would probably give a lot of output though as you would get temp internet files with php extensions.

The find program is more usefull when you want to search all your files in the given path for an expression. Such as have find print out all your files that were modified in last days, or find files of a special user or whatever. There are a lot of things you can search for. (check manpages) Anyway I believe you can give it an option like -name or something to search for matches of a certain name, but as I said locate is more usefull for this purpose.

Oh and by the way, another command that can be usefull is whereis (to find binaries and man pages entries for a program)

Hope this helps.

MadNewbie