How to know the path of a particular software?

Find the path of an executable

Best way

• type executable

Check out this question to learn more about how type is better. (Thanks, comments!)

Other ways

• whereis executable
• which executable

Those commands only search in the PATH variable (echo $PATH), thus they are not valid in some cases (built-in functions, aliases, or bash functions, and more).

Find command location inside or outside of path

Assume you want to find the location of uname, a program that lists system information. If you want to know what directory the top level command is stored in you have a number of options:

$ which uname
/bin/uname

$ type -a uname
uname is /bin/uname

$ command -v uname
/bin/uname

$ locate uname
/bin/uname
    (... SNIP dozens of Windows files on C & D ...)
/usr/lib/klibc/bin/uname
/usr/lib/plainbox-provider-resource-generic/bin/uname_resource
/usr/share/man/man1/uname.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man2/oldolduname.2.gz
/usr/share/man/man2/olduname.2.gz
/usr/share/man/man2/uname.2.gz

Locate advantages

The last option locate returns all files containing uname not just the program that is run from the command prompt.

The advantage of locate is it will find commands not in your search path. type -a (preferred over simple type) and which will only find commands in your search path. To see your search path use echo $PATH.

Take for example this answer in How to start screencloud? :

Try...

/opt/screencloud/screencloud.sh

The locate screencloud command will find it but which screencloud and type -a screencloud will not because:

• The full name is screencloud.sh and only locate command searches on partial match.
• /opt/screencloud probably isn't in the search path. which and type only look for executable files in search path.

Note: This is an older answer. Modern ScreenCloud is called with screencloud.

Locate's advantage over the find command is it can be hundreds or even thousands of times faster. Also running find starting from / will give many permission errors you won't experience with locate.

Locate disadvantages

If you just installed the program today you will need to use sudo updatedb to update locate's database.

Use the following command to list all of your $PATH directories:

echo $PATH | sed 's/:/\n/g'

Use the following command to find the full path for screencloud:

for i in $(echo $PATH | sed 's/:/\n/g'); do find $i/screencloud* 2>@1; done

If you used apt, apt-get, or the Ubuntu Software Center to install the package, you can use the following command to find the full path:

dpkg -L screencloud | grep bin

Assuming you used this repository, you should be able to find screencloud in /usr/bin/.

The full path is:

/usr/bin/screencloud

or

/usr/bin/screencloud-*

However, if you used the snapcraft store according to the link you provided in your question, then the path would be under the following directory:

/snap/bin

more info

Also, please remember that Ubuntu is case sensitive so you must use all lowercase with no capital letters.