Search Path

When you enter a command at the command-line prompt, the shell needs to be able to find the command on the filesystem. This is handled by the shell’s search path.

We can see the current path by doing:

echo $PATH

Note

By default, the current directory, ., is not included in the search path.

If a command is not found in the search path, then you need to give the full absolute or relative path to the command. For a command in your current directory, like myscript.sh, we can do this by prepending ./, which means “look in the current directory, .”, e.g.,

./myscript.sh