Uber-noob ? about commands

General system Newbie
1

I know this is probably some super entry level information that I should have found long ago, but I can’t find it anywhere.

How the hell do I find what the command is for a given package? Is there a command to find the command? The only way I currently know of is by searching the internet, but I’d like to be able to do this from the terminal.

2

usually it’s one of those:

program --help
program -h
man program
3

But wouldn’t program in this scenario be the command itself? I’ve tried this using the package name and I get “command not found” error from bash.

4

If command is not found you probably haven’t installed that program correctly or are using the incorrect name of the program

5

Not necessary, it’s binary file inside of package, what package you wanted to know info about?

For example to view manual for man itself, it would be:

man man
6

I just tried this with xorg-xmodmap, which I’m looking at the pacman search of right now and that says it is installed and I’m getting the command not found error. The command is certainly different than the package name in many situation.

@keybreak xorg-xmodmap, which I am likely misunderstanding the use of, but I remember using something similar, if not this exact package previously through the command line.

Let me try this with some other packages.

7

Oh, try to list all the binary files of that package:

pacman -Qlq xorg-xmodmap | grep "/bin"

So the command should be xmodmap

man xmodmap
xmodmap --help
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8

Ah yeah, that’s the thing I’m looking for. I probably could have hashed that out from your previous reply reminding me that commands are just binaries. Thank you very much.

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9

In addition to the above, there are lots of useful commands for searching info and help:

  • yay -Qn
  • yay -Qm
  • pacman -Ss word(s)
  • yay -Ss word(s)
  • pacman -Fl <package-name> | grep usr/bin
  • eos-apps-info-helper <package-name>
  • eos-apps-info-helper <command-name>

just to name only a few…

1 Like
10

Just to be nitpicky: executables are not necessarily binaries. Some are text files (usually we call them scripts). :frog:

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11

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