Now for something completely different

[Jeff McCright]

Dana,

MS-DOS assumes that the current (or active) directory
is in the search path. Unix/Linux makes no assumption.
When you type ./ you are telling the system to look into
the current directory and run the executable there. MS-DOS
automatically appends . to your search path. As to changing
the behaviour of Linux/Unix, I cannot help other than to offer
this relatively lame solution... add all your directories that
have your executables to your path. This could
reduce system performance and could cause you to run
executables with the same filename from other directories
if those other directoires appear in the path statement
before the current directory. Maybe someone else has
a fix for this...

Thanks,

Jeff McCright
jeff.mccright at southernunionco.com

 ----------
From: kclug at kclug.org
To: kclug at kclug.org
Cc: jeff.mccright at southernunionco.com
Subject: kclug - Now for something completely different

<<File Attachment: MESSAGE TEXT.HTML>>
I know it is a holdover from my DOS days,
but I just can't get used to having to put
./ in front of executable files when I want
to run them from the directory in which
they reside.

Can anyone tell me why this is?

More importantly, is there any way to
change this behavior?

Dana Smith