On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 09:58:11AM -0700, Timothy Alberts wrote: > My first question is, are the shell commands and features standardized > somewhere so that I know what commands I can expect to have no matter > what machine I'm sitting at or what type of installation I have? My There is a typical set of Unix utilities, but in general, "no". > second question is, if these commands are supposed to be there, but the > shell comes back and says they aren't, what is the procedure for finding > the commands or installing the packages required for them? Try "yum provides /usr/bin/commandname". (You'll need to run this as root the first time, but after that, can be done as a normal user.) You can then install the packages named -- or even do "yum install /usr/bin/commandname". > help me find a missing command. I also understand that typically shell > commands are in /bin /usr/bin /usr/local/bin among others. If it helps, > when I type 'which ifconfig' the following is the result: > /usr/bin/which: no ifconfig in > (/usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin: > /usr/X11R6/bin:/home/talberts/bin) Ah. This is a different case -- some commands (generally those designed for use by the sysadmin and of little use to anyone else) live in /sbin or /usr/sbin. In this case, /sbin/ifconfig. (Arguably, this is wrong, since ifconfig is also useful to normal users, so it maybe should be /bin/ifconfig. But it's pretty traditional for it to be in /sbin at this point.) Incidentally, commands in /bin or /sbin are ones that may be needed at system boot -- everything else goes in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin. (If /usr is a network filesystem or something, those locations may not be available at boot time.) Anyway, you can find an arbitrary file on your system with "locate": $ locate ifconfig /sbin/ifconfig /usr/share/man/de/man8/ifconfig.8.gz /usr/share/man/fr/man8/ifconfig.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/ifconfig.8.gz /usr/share/man/pt/man8/ifconfig.8.gz Often, this gives too much information (it returns any file which matches the given string anywhere in the path), so you may want to do something like $ locate ifconfig | grep bin /sbin/ifconfig -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
