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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu actually does make it hard to find files. Is it in /usr/bin? /usr/local/bin? /bin? /sbin? /etc/bin? /opt? /god-knows-what-directory?

Honestly, on linux, there should be /usr/local/bin, which is never touched by system management, for source installations, /sbin for emergency recovery tools, and /usr/bin for EVERYTHING ELSE. This is pretty much the only thing that fdo got right.

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for executables, use which <name>

for everything else, use mlocate

sudo updatedb

locate <name>

I don't see how that's hard at all.

> use wich <name>

or the even easier to remember 'whereis <name>'

I recently started playing with lisp in ubuntu and decided to go with slime for it. So i installed slime through ubuntu software manager, couldn't find it, couldn't start it (i'm totally new to emacs and slime). After that I read some manuals, made changes to .emacs config and eventually installed slime using emacs and its package manager. Now i'm wondering if i have 2 versions of slime where are they located, which one is being actually used etc.

Why should anyone need to have admin privileges to find a file?

Because updatedb needs to look at your system's private parts. Try

    find /. | grep [string]

which will look everywhere for [string]

From the updatedb manpage:

updatedb is usually run daily by cron(8) to update the default database.

Also:

To create a private mlocate database as an user other than root, run

    updatedb -l 0 -o db_file -U source_directory

Note that all users that can read db_file can get the complete list of files in the subtree of source_directory.

On the other hand, "what's the point of this apparently pointless complexity?" is a very good question.

That's my point. On linux, there really is no distinction between /bin and /usr/bin. /usr/local/bin is different, as it's the designated location for stuff you install from source. /sbin is also different, because that's where you want your recovery tools. Although usually you'll boot into a livecd for recovery these days, so it's kind of moot.

Again, this about the only thing that systemd, fdo, etc. and I agree on.

> Although usually you'll boot into a livecd for recovery these days, so it's kind of moot.

thats taking a very "desktop" view on things.

Many more systems run as headless installs in some rack somewhere.

Good point, actually. Sorry. I'm not a professional, so I've got less experience with that.

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