A command such as yum list firefox will tell me the version of firefox I presently have installed, but not where it is installed. Is there a way of finding the path to an installation?

maybe use: #find / -name firefox to find

$ whereis firefox

should do the job.

or..

$ which firefox

Applications in Linux typically get installed to various locations - bin, share, man, etc and so on based on which part of the application you're talking about. As camelrider said the "which" command is handy for finding out where the executable binary is located (assuming it's not a library). Depending on your distribution you can probably also use the "locate" command to find stuff (I'd be very surprised if FC6 didn't regularly rebuild the slocate database).

As for "which", I often use it in combination with other commands, for example "ldd $(which tar)" will tell you each dynamic library that is used by "tar" which may help track down issues with multiple versions of the same library installed at the same time, for example.

If locate does need to to be updated, then as root:

updatedb


and yes that is typed correctly.


What may be of more importance is, why you need to know? Unlike windows one seldom needs to know where a program is located.

Lazlow

Thank's everyone for your help. Lazlo, I asked because I'm attempting to follow Sun's JRE installation instructions to install their plugin for mozilla, where they state "If mozilla is installed in this directory:..."