ANT_HOME Path. what to set when installed using apt-get install

Question

Forgive me for the superfluous questions, but i have been thinking about it for some time now.

I wanted to install "ant" on my local machine today so I did a normal

   sudo apt-get install ant

it worked like a charm!

   ant -version 

the above command spitted out the following .

   Apache Ant(TM) version 1.9.2 compiled on July 14 2013

the command

    ant

gave me the following output

  Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
  Build failed

Now I wanted to setup ANT_HOME environment variable in my ~/.bashrc file. which got me the my query.

1) I am not sure what path to use , initially I was under the impression that sudo apt-get install xyz installs the software in /usr/bin directory but then when I browsed through the directory it was not there instead I found ant folder sitting in /usr/bin/shared directory. I wanted to know if my knowledge is incorrect about the /usr/bin directory.

2) I wanted to know how to see the installation path or the root directory of the software installed in ubuntu 13.10

I want to learn and I was hoping you guys could help me out !! :)

Thanks !

Answer 1

which ant will give you the absolute path to any executable accessible in your $PATH, ie:

jonny$ which java /usr/bin/java

As for why you want to set your ANT_HOME environment variable - I don't think that's going to help with the missing build.xml error you encountered - that's ANT's way of telling you it expects to find your build script in the current working directory. If you want to point ANT to another build.xml file, you can use the -f switch, ie:

ant -f ~/Projects/foo/build.xml