How to find the command of an installed application?

Question

I have an installed application, but I don't know its name. (By "name" I mean what I would type in a command line.)

Is there any way to see this? It seems so obvious, but I can't figure it out.

Answer 1

If the installed application has installed a menu option, then right-click the menu at the top of the screen and choose Edit Menus. If you are using Natty, type "alacarte" in the terminal

Navigate to the menu option and choose the Properties button - you'll then see the command to launch your application.

Answer 2

What I do is Applications > [application you're looking for], right-click, select 'Add this launcher to panel'. The icon will appear on the panel from which you can right-click it and select Properties. It'll show the command there.

This probably only works for the old Gnome UI but I thought I'd still share anyway. You may be able to do something similar on Unity, I'm not sure.

Answer 3

If your application were an RSS reader, for example, 'man -k rss' or 'man -k feed' might yield some ideas, as would 'apropos rss'.

Answer 4

Go under Administration / Synaptic, and go to your Package. Right click to open Properties. Here you can see all the files that this package has installed.

The binary (aka executable) files are usually found under /usr/bin.

Answer 5

The way I occasionally do that is to launch Synaptic Package Manager, find the package with the app I installed, and look into it's properties, at the list of installed files this package contains. Most exacutables land to /usr/bin, so I look for files installed in that directory, and that's what you need to run.

For example, I installed liblo-tools package. Now I see the following in installed files list:

...
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/oscdump
/usr/bin/oscsend
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
...

That means I can run oscsend or oscdump commands to run appropriate liblo proggrams.

Note: Some apps will install their programs to other directories, but that's rare. For example, games may install it's executables to /usr/games instead of /usr/bin

Answer 6

If it is a package installed from repos, or through a deb package, try the command:

dpkg -L package-name | grep /bin

Answer 7

Try typing the name of the application along with using TAB. If the application is in the path then you can able to see that.