Powersurge wrote:Well you can install a file via the command line, or use the inbuilt package manager, but you don't need to find the executable file (Linux doesn't use .exe files), it will ether be in the main menu, or you just type the name of the program into the command line to run it, so to start a virus scan i just type avast hit enter, and it runs.
Linux may not use .exe files as such, but it does use executables. But in this case it doesn't matter what the file extension is, it doesn't even have to have one.
The package system is also not the only way to install programs. You can also download the packages without installing them, you may archive them and pass them to the package manager at your leisure.
You also have the luxury of downloading precompiled binaries for anything that supplies them in the same way you do with windows.
And finally you can download the source code of any program you wish to run and compile it yourself at you leisure.
At no time are you ever forced to download and install something immediately and against your will.
Shadowman wrote:What if there's two programs with the same designation, in different directories?
It's very easy. Back in the days of DOS it was common to have this line in your autoexec.bat
SET PATH=C:\ or SET PATH=C:\DOS\
Wherever you kept your dos tools. That way if you ever needed to run them you would just type the program name rather than going through the trouble of changing directories.
Modern Windows Run works in the same way, looking for programs in C:\Windows\, C:\Windows\System32 etc if no path is specified.
Anyhoo, if you have an executable you wish to run that is already in your "set path", we'll call it "paint" you simply use your terminal to navigate to it's directory.
If I were to type just "paint", it would launch the program that is already in the "set path", this I believe is a good choice to help prevent launching unwanted executables, rather than Windows/DOS' choice of launching whatever is in the current path by default.
To run the paint program in the current directory that doesn't normally run I would just add "./" to the front of it.
"./paint" would launch the second executable instead of the default.
It's all fun stuff, and I'm still a relative newb to linux myself. But I am learning so much every day.