How to find the command of an installed application?

I have an installed application, but I don't know its name. (By "name" I mean what I would type in a command line.)

Is there any way to see this? It seems so obvious, but I can't figure it out.


If the installed application has installed a menu option, then right-click the menu at the top of the screen and choose Edit Menus. If you are using Natty, type "alacarte" in the terminal

Navigate to the menu option and choose the Properties button - you'll then see the command to launch your application.

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If it is a package installed from repos, or through a deb package, try the command:

dpkg -L package-name | grep /bin

The way I occasionally do that is to launch Synaptic Package Manager, find the package with the app I installed, and look into it's properties, at the list of installed files this package contains. Most exacutables land to /usr/bin, so I look for files installed in that directory, and that's what you need to run.

For example, I installed liblo-tools package. Now I see the following in installed files list:

...
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/oscdump
/usr/bin/oscsend
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
...

That means I can run oscsend or oscdump commands to run appropriate liblo proggrams.

Note: Some apps will install their programs to other directories, but that's rare. For example, games may install it's executables to /usr/games instead of /usr/bin


Try typing the name of the application along with using TAB. If the application is in the path then you can able to see that.