./ [WAS: Re: Terminal Syntax]

[James Heaver]

On 25/06/07, Greg Booth <bootgr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/25/07, James Heaver <james at heaver.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 25/06/07, Greg Booth <bootgr at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > Then to run ANY windows executable from the command line it's simply
> > > wine ./<EXE NAME> so a file setup.exe would be ( assuming you're in
> > > the directory where the executable is located )
> > >
> > > wine ./setup.exe
> > >
> > > The . is important so make sure to include it.
> >
> >
> > What does the ./ mean, I've seen it in this, and other contexts
> (compiling
> > form source perhaps) and never known what it does.
>
> the dot to look in the current directory. Unlike windows that
> automatically contains your working directory in the search path for
> executables linux only includes necessary directories such as /usr/bin
> /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin where the majority of your binaries
> reside.
>
> Why they do this I'm not 100% sure, I believe it's for security. For
> example if I could drop a new binary called ls into your root drive,
> the next time you typed ls to get a listing of files in a directory
> you'd be running the hacked virus version, and not the version in
> /usr/bin like you should be. To run the version in your root directory
> you'd have to type out the full ./ls



Fantastic - that makes perfect sense.  Its little things like that which can
be very hard to learn, and once you do know (and understand) I can imagine
make a huge difference to the intuitiveness of the system.

I can imagine that tidbits like that are difficult to impart in an
organised, documented way, but does anyone know of where I could look for
things like that?


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09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
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