Where is the dotnet runtime installed to on Ubuntu?

Question

I'm trying to use dotnet (.NET Core) with cron jobs, but it seems the path variable for dotnet doesn't exist in the scope of cron. I'd like to add the path to cron, but I need to know where dotnet is actually installed to from a typical Ubuntu installation. Also knowing how to add the path variable to cron would be helpful also, but I think I can figure that out once I have the dotnet installation directory.

Solution 1

After seeing the comment by Gomes, I checked and it seems both are valid in my system:

$ /usr/bin/dotnet --version
2.1.400
$ /usr/share/dotnet/dotnet --version
2.1.400

I did a bit more research and it appears that the usual way to find this in many unix dialects (as per https://kb.iu.edu/d/acec) is with the help of whereis command:

$ whereis dotnet
dotnet: /usr/bin/dotnet /usr/share/dotnet /usr/share/man/man1/dotnet.1.gz

But with further scrutiny, I could see that /usr/bin/dotnet is just a symlink to /share/dotnet/dotnet:

/usr/bin$ ll dotnet
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jun 29 17:48 dotnet -> ../share/dotnet/dotnet*

And that page also shows how to see which one the operating system uses when running a command you type in the terminal, which command:

$ which dotnet
/usr/bin/dotnet

Solution 2

By default, .NET Core ("dotnet") is installed to /usr/share/dotnet/

As far as I can tell, one cannot permanently set a path environment variable for cron, but can do so temporarily by adding a script to the crontab file before the part that you need the variable for (see here)

Alternatively, you can just specify the absolute path to dotnet in the crontab i.e. /usr/share/dotnet/dotnet run --project /path/to/csproj/