SAMS Teach Yourself Red Hat® Fedora™ 4 Linux® All in One

Understanding Executable Files

So far in your exploration of Linux, you've seen several basic text files and several directories or folders. Now we're going to expand our horizons to include other types of Linux files. For example, the /bin directory in the standard Linux file system contains another type of file, called an executable file. Executable files can be programs, commands, or scripts—tools and applications that you tell the computer to run, often from the command line, to get things done.

You can use the ls command to view the contents of the /bin directory:

[you@workstation20 ~]$ ls /bin
arch        dnsdomainname    gzip      more           rview       traceroute6
awk         doexec           hostname  mount          sed         true
[...] df gtar mknod rpm tracepath6 dmesg gunzip mktemp rvi [you@workstation20 ...