OpenOffice.org where is the executable file?

[corge]

I have recently installed OpenOffice.org and I can't find any executable file that actually starts up OpenOffice.

What is the equivalent to the old "soffice" executable which previously would start up OpenOffice?

I installed by executing the "setup" program after extracting the archive, I selected pretty much all of the items to be installed (at least the essential ones) and then let it install -- I didn't get to choose the path to install to, but I saw it stated that this would be installed under /opt.

I see two directories:

/opt/openoffice.org
/opt/openoffice.org3

Neither of which contains any readily identifiable file that is the main program.

What file should I execute?

[MikeTbob]

Try using command line.

whereis openoffice

[corge]

Try using command line.

whereis openoffice

That will not work for the following reasons:

1: The executable file is called "soffice", not "openoffice"
2: /opt/openoffice* is not in whereis' hard-coded path nor in the system environment PATH

[coopstah13]

should be like oowriter, oocalc, ooimpress, etc

they all start with oo

[Mudgen]

There's a shell script, /usr/bin/openoffice.org, that's called with an argument to specify the command line switch for soffice. The Writer launcher, for instance, calls it it with "-writer". That switch is actually an entry point for soffice, telling it which personality to adopt: Calc, Draw, Impress, Writer. The script execs soffice, which is why you can't find openoffice in the process table.

[kiore]

I can't speak for other distributions, but in my Kubuntu 10.04, the Open Office.org front-ends are in /usr/bin

~$ ls /usr/bin/oo*                                                  
/usr/bin/oobase  /usr/bin/ooffice         /usr/bin/oomath    /usr/bin/ooxml2doc
/usr/bin/oocalc  /usr/bin/oofromtemplate  /usr/bin/ooweb     /usr/bin/ooxml2odt
/usr/bin/oodraw  /usr/bin/ooimpress       /usr/bin/oowriter

These are all thin wrappers around a call to the main soffice executable. For example

~$ more /usr/bin/oocalc 
#!/bin/sh
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice -calc "$@"

[Mudgen]

Interesting that the packaging is that different for different current distros. I posted based on inspection of Fedora 12 and 14. But the bottom line is the same WRT calling soffice with an entry point. But in your distro, the wrapper script doesn't exec it, so it should remain in the process table until exit.

[Rubberman]

Actually, the main startup executable is /usr/bin/soffice, which is a link to /opt/openoffice.org/program/soffice. In /opt/openoffice.org/program directory you will find the individual executables sbase, scalc, sdraw, simpress, smath, swriter, et al. There may be some distributions that repackage OOo to use other names, but this is how it comes from openoffice.org, or if you are using LibreOffice, all this will be in the /opt/libreoffice/program directory.

[Mudgen]

Whew. As we drill down, this gets more convoluted all the time. Actually scalc, for example, is a shell script that calls scalc.bin, the real executable.

On Red Hat variants, the location is /usr/lib[64]/openoffice.org3/program.

Thanks all. I've learned something tonight.

[kurtdriver]

2: /opt/openoffice* is not in whereis' hard-coded path nor in the system environment PATH

Try locate instead.

 locate openoffice

If that doesn't work, you may have to update the database, which you do, as root, with

 updatedb

It might have helped had you told us which distro you are enquiring about. They vary their aproaches, sometimes quite a bit.