Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations Chriss Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Linking update programs
- Thread starter ronfarris
- Start date
Hi Ron,
You probably don't need to bother with linking and such.
In UNIX the $PATH variable is the key to knowing which version of an executable program or script will be run.
$PATH is a ':' separated list of directories. When you type a command at the shell prompt this list of directories is searched until a matching executable file is found or the end of the list is run. Unlike DOS and Winxx the current directory is *not* searched unless it is included in $PATH.
So -- let's say you have a program called "my_prog" and you want to install version 2 of my_prog, so that version 2 will run rather than the current version.
At the shell prompt -- type:
whence my_prog
This command will search $PATH for you until it finds an executable version of my_prog -- it won't run my_prog though, it will just print out the full path of the first match it finds. Let's say your shell session looks like this:
$ whence my_prog
/usr/local/bin/my_prog
$
This means that the file "my_prog" in the directory /usr/local/bin will be executed when you type "my_prog" at the shell prompt.
To replace that version of my_prog, copy the new version over the top of it -- if the new version is stored in /usr/new_vers/my_prog the command to do that would look like this:
cp /usr/new_vers/my_prog /usr/local/bin/my_prog
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.
You probably don't need to bother with linking and such.
In UNIX the $PATH variable is the key to knowing which version of an executable program or script will be run.
$PATH is a ':' separated list of directories. When you type a command at the shell prompt this list of directories is searched until a matching executable file is found or the end of the list is run. Unlike DOS and Winxx the current directory is *not* searched unless it is included in $PATH.
So -- let's say you have a program called "my_prog" and you want to install version 2 of my_prog, so that version 2 will run rather than the current version.
At the shell prompt -- type:
whence my_prog
This command will search $PATH for you until it finds an executable version of my_prog -- it won't run my_prog though, it will just print out the full path of the first match it finds. Let's say your shell session looks like this:
$ whence my_prog
/usr/local/bin/my_prog
$
This means that the file "my_prog" in the directory /usr/local/bin will be executed when you type "my_prog" at the shell prompt.
To replace that version of my_prog, copy the new version over the top of it -- if the new version is stored in /usr/new_vers/my_prog the command to do that would look like this:
cp /usr/new_vers/my_prog /usr/local/bin/my_prog
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.
- Thread starter
- #3
Ron,
Talk to your sysadmin again -- what you need to do is quite reasonable. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to get work like this done.
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.
Talk to your sysadmin again -- what you need to do is quite reasonable. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to get work like this done.
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.
- Status