cannot find files or directories

[Erik Christiansen]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 04:55:33PM -0400, Verde Denim wrote:
> 
> Could someone tell me why which and whereis cannot find a program
> which has just been installed?

"which" can be expected to find executables in $PATH. If you try
"echo $PATH", it doesn't show /usr3, does it? For this reason also,
executables in /usr3 ought not run unless prefixed with full path,
until you've also updated $PATH.

"whereis" cannot really be expected to help, because /usr3 is not in a
"list of standard Linux places".

...

> I tried running updatedb after the install, but the program is still
> not locate-able with either 'which' or 'whereis' ...

updatedb updates the [s]locate database, so "locate some_file" should
now work. It has zero interaction with the other utilities. The unix way
traditionally employs a large box of independent single-purpose tools,
from which we choose, as with assorted chocolates. (I like vim & awk
flavours, others prefer emacs & sed.)

> What am I missing?

Awareness that comes from taking a quick look at the manpages, perhaps. ;-)
(Just the brief NAME and DESCRIPTION paragraphs can be enough, the first
time in.)

Erik