On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 01:12:57PM -0500, Dan Hyatt wrote: > In my bin directory, most of the binaries are linked to it. It is in my > path. I have googled this and cannot find anything close. > > I am running bash on centos6.8 > > When I run "which command" most of the files in this custom bin directory > show up. > > When I run "which file.jar" it cannot see it, but I can *ls* the file (soft > link) > > as which only works on executables (according to man page), I created a > dan.jar empty file and did a which on dan.tar and found it. > > > can anyone explain what is happening and how I can soft link the jar files > to my bin directory so which can see them? > I don't use java, so this may be way off base. I'm assuming you have several *.jar files, but will work with two, foo.jar and bar.jar. Place all your jar files in a single directory, not bin. Under lib is the common place. I'll use /home/dan/lib/jarfiles. In your bin directory place a shell script named "foo" containing something like this: #!/usr/bin/bash ProgName=${0##*/} # (basename) strips dirs from path JarDir=/home/dan/lib/jarfiles JarFile=${JarDir}/${ProgName}.jar ## possibly test for existance of jar file java -jar ${JarFile} "${@}" # I assume there may be args to pass. That would let you run foo.jar as "foo" and do a "which foo" as it is an executable shell script. For bar.jar you merely need to put it in the JarDir and make a link in the bin directory: ln /home/dan/bin/foo /home/dan/bin/bar Do the same for each *.jar, move to JarDir, make a link. If particular jar files need special treatment you can put a switch statement in the script based on $ProgName. Jon -- Jon H. LaBadie jcu at jgcomp.com 11226 South Shore Rd. (703) 787-0688 (H) Reston, VA 20190 (703) 935-6720 (C)