installed, compiled, how to link?

[John (Eljay) Love-Jensen]

> ... unix looked in local directory first 30 years ago, so I suppose there is good reason to have changed it.

As far as I am aware, Unix only looked in the current working directory 30 years ago if you told it to.

>How do I deal with paths?

Using the bash shell, put this in your ~/.bashrc file:

PATH=.:$PATH

That prefixes . (the current working directory) to the paths to search when looking for executables.

HTH,
--Eljay