This is not a question, but rather a simple how-to for
programmers who are new to the UNIX environment.

I too,am new to UNIX.
First I developed a few programs on my box and perfected them
until they were satisfactory for execution.

Problem was however, that once i compiled and all that,
it occured to me, that i was new to Unix and had no freakin
clue about how to run my apps from the command-line.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how in the !$#@ to do this.

To experienced users, this is probably 'duh!' however, to a new
user like myself, this was all frustrating.

I spent a long time working on my little program and assumed that if it works it would run. Makes sense to me.
---------
Well, i was very wrong, and after i compiled my source file "myprogram.c" with the GNU CC compiler using the line:

cc myprogram.c

then another file appeared, called:

a.out

This was because i didn't specify a name for my program.

Having very little patients with the available documentation, I found nothing about running a program once you've created it.

So i tried typing my programs name in:

a.out [ENTER]

No good, instead i get a reply back saying:

a.out: Command not found.

I just wanted my freakin program to run.

Well, good news, it 'turns out' that prefixing the programs name with "./" works.

--thats a dot, a slash and then the programs path and name

so finally i entered:

./a.out [ENTER]

and voila! the darn thing worked.

If this seemed a bit long winded, it was.
I just hope this helps someone in the future.

late,
kray