Originally Posted by omrsafetyo

In order just to type the name of the file to execute, it needs to be in an executable directory - so for e.g. if you have a script that is used frequently, drop it in /usr/local/bin and it will become executable from anywhere. You can also add the current directory as an executable path with:
[code]
PATH=${PATH}PWD
[code]
However, please note that this can be extremely dangerous - because then any script in the current directory can accidentally be run.

I'm not quite sure what your second question is getting at. It sounds like you are trying to recreate the "which" command.

If you type which ls it will tell you which ls your local environment executes.

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$ which ls
/bin/ls

$ which ls /bin/ls

In order to recreate this, you would have to delimit the user's path variable:

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command=$1
for path in `echo $PATH | sed "s/:/ /g"`
do
   ls $path | grep $command
done

command=$1 for path in `echo $PATH | sed "s/:/ /g"` do ls $path | grep $command done

Unlike which, this will return all installed instances (in your path) - the which command will only return the first instance found, which is the program that would actually be executed on your system.