Simple file doesn't run (command not found!)

Question

Here in the screen shot, there is a window and terminal open.

I am running on Ubuntu 10.04(kernel 2.6) LTS 64bit LiveCD session, and trying to run testDisk to recover my another formatted partition.

But, whenever I run the

sudo testdisk_static

command, it says, command not found!

As you can see in the picture, this file(testdisk_static) exists. if i double click it nothing happens. Its not running from terminal either.

Why this file doesn't run? What to do in this situation?

Solution

Since testdisk_static is not in your $PATH, you need to specify the path for it to run.

You can use a relative path if you are in the same directory: sudo ./testdisk_static

or you can specify the absolute path from any working directory: sudo /media/Foxtrot\ Bravo/testdisk-6.12/testdisk_static [Note: the backslash after Foxtrot is important to escape the space that follows.]

Comments

[Quazi Irfan]

I was already in that directory, why do I need to use ./ that marks relative path?

[koanhead]

You need to do that because bash searches the paths found in $PATH. Bash has no way to guess that you want the command in the current directory unless you tell it so explicitly with ./ - this is necessary so that you can run other commands (like ls, cd, et al) from wherever you happen to be.