Installing a program on Linux: providing a short command
- by rwallace
Suppose you're distributing a program to run on Linux, call it Foo, and the program executable is called foo.exe (because it's a CLR program so it runs under Mono) and it needs a couple of DLLs in the same directory and maybe a later version might need some data files that it reads on startup and whatever, so relocating it to a global bin directory is a bit of hassle and it really prefers to remain in its original directory...
But the user would prefer to invoke the program by typing foo instead of mono /path/to/foo.exe.
What's the best/most usual way to provide such a short command? Can/should an install script/makefile create a one line script called foo that invokes the full path, and put the one line script in a global bin directory? If so, what should be the target bin directory, and are there any directions about exactly how to do this? Or is there a preferred alternative?
