Find running apps on hard drive

[Longman, Bill]

> --- Janus Sandsgaard <lister@janus.dk> wrote:
> > Mandag den 25. august 2003 00:32 skrev Clinton
> > MacDonald:
> > 
> > > Many applications are available through the kicker
> > menu in Yellow Dog
> > > Linux, but others can be had through simple
> > commands. How do I
> > > determine the true name and location of an
> > application I can only
> > > activate through the kicker or through other
> > means?
> 
> > If you are looking for the location of an
> > application you can find it using 
> > the "locate" command in the terminal, all though you
> > often geta long list of 
> > directorys and files related to that program.
> 
> isn't this what the 'which' command is for?
> but then i guess you have to already know the name of
> the command huh?

If you are trying to find the name of a program and you only kinda know what
it does, you can use "apropos". It is basically a tool that looks through
all the man page descriptions for the text you give it.

Let's say I want to find the programs that will monitor my cpu.

$ apropos monitor

whoosh! 91 lines of mumbo-jumbo, most of which are XFree86 video "stuff".

$ apropos monitor | grep -v 3x

Ah! Much better. One page, most of which is Tcl variable "info".

I do see, though, that fam, xconsole and gkrellm are possible options.

The cousin of apropos is whatis. If there's a man page for a command, whatis
gives you the man page description of the command. You might be able to get
more immediate assistance with Tobey's --help suggestion.

Finally, if it's the full path of the command you are looking for:

$ type -p fam
/usr/bin/fam

Bill