You may have noticed in the previous section that we haven't yet called hello in quite the same way we would another program; we still have to put the ./ prefix first, or specify a full path to it. It doesn't work otherwise:
bash$ ./hello Hello, bashuser! bash$ /home/bashuser/hello Hello, bashuser! bash$ hello bash: hello: command not found
What's missing? The answer is that we need to use the special PATH variable to specify where it can find commands such as hello, without needing to specify a full filesystem path to them.
Let's take a look at the value of PATH; your own value may vary:
bash$ declare -p PATH declare -x PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
We notice two things:
- It's an environment variable (-x ...
