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Searching on the dash, I can see the program listed as "Personal File Sharing". How can I find the executable name of this program such that it can be launched in a terminal?

d3pd
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1 Answers1

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Open terminal and use grep to search for "personal file sharing" in /usr/share/applications folder.

In fact, you will have this output:

$ grep -R -i "personal file sharing" /usr/share/applications
/usr/share/applications/gnome-user-share-properties.desktop:Name=Personal File Sharing

Now, if we do this:

$ grep "Exec" /usr/share/applications/gnome-user-share-properties.desktop
Exec=gnome-file-share-properties

That the actual program that runs is `gnome-file-share-properties, which is located at

$ which gnome-file-share-properties
/usr/bin/gnome-file-share-properties

To be more specific, what happens is that in linux there are .desktop files. They are somewhat similar to Windows' shortcuts. These files contain fields Name= and Exec=. Name part is how the program shows up in the dash search and unity panel. Exec is the actual binary that gets executed

Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
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    If my answer was helpful , please upvote. If I solved your problem, please click gray checkmark to accept the answer as a valid solution – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Sep 28 '15 at 07:42
  • Thank you very much for your detailed answer. How to search for the launcher in `/usr/share/applications` was particularly helpful. – d3pd Sep 28 '15 at 07:55