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If you have an application which relies on another app being installed, you ideally want your installer to find that dependency path automatically. On Windows you can use the registry but what about Mac/Linux? In this particular case it’s a C++ application, if that makes a difference.
Generally, on UNIX systems you can expect all programs to reside in $PATH instead of being distributed in a hodge-podge collection of stupidly named and partially localized directories. So, essentially you don’t need to find any dependency path – you just call the other “app” (program) via execvp, and the libc takes care of walking through the entries of $PATH and finding the executable.
In the classic UNIX model, you don’t check anything in an installer, but just check at runtime whether an executable is available (with which, for example) or not.