How to run Telegram from Terminal

So I have telegram messenger on my Ubuntu and I'm trying to launch it from terminal and later on set it up as startup program - problem is I cannot find command to run it. telegram/Telegram don't work.

This is how I installed this app:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/telegram
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install telegram

Thank you for any help.

4 Answers

The app is installed in

/opt/telegram/

and the binary is

/opt/telegram/Telegram

To start the messenger via command line, you have to use the full path or add the path to your PATH definition or create a symbolic link in /usr/bin:

• Use the PATH

  1. Edit the file ~/.profile

     nano ~/.profile

  2. and add the line below at the end of the file

     export PATH="$PATH:/opt/telegram"

OR

• Use a symbolic link

  sudo ln -s /opt/telegram/Telegram /usr/local/bin

You have a desktop file:

/usr/share/applications/telegram.desktop

and therefore use the command below

cp /usr/share/applications/telegram.desktop ~/.config/autostart

to create an autostart entry via command line.

Why do I know that?

% dpkg -L telegram
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/telegram
/usr/share/doc/telegram/copyright
/usr/share/doc/telegram/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/applications
/usr/share/applications/telegram.desktop
/opt
/opt/telegram
/opt/telegram/telegram.tar.xz
/opt/telegram/telegram.svg % cat /usr/share/applications/telegram.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=Telegram
Exec=/opt/telegram/Telegram
Comment=Network taking back our right to privacy.
Icon=/opt/telegram/telegram.svg
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Network;

If you installed using snap, try

telegram-desktop

Use a Bash alias like this:

alias tg='/opt/telegram/Telegram'

And then just type:

tg

in Terminal and it will open Telegram. You can replace tg with what you like.

You can use TelegramTUI on your terminal