Shell - How to find directory of some command

Question

I know that when you are on shell  the only commands that can be used are the ones that can be found on some directory set on PATH  Even I don t know how to see what dirs are on my PATH variable  and this is another good question that could be answered   what I d like to know is   I come to shell and write     lshw   I want to know a command on shell that can tell me WHERE this command is located  In other words  where this  executable file  is located   Something like     location lshw  usr bin   Anyone

User · Answer

The Korn shell  ksh  offers the whence built-in  which identifies other shell built-ins  macros  etc   The which command is more portable  however

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echo  PATH  home jack bin  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games    whereis lshw lshw   usr bin lshw  usr share man man1 lshw 1 gz

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An alternative to type -a is command -V  Since most of the times I am interested in the first result only  I also pipe from head  This way the screen will not flood with code in case of a bash function   command -V lshw   head -n1

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In the TENEX C Shell  tcsh  one can list a command s location s   or if it is a built-in command  using the where command e g    tcsh  where python  usr local bin python  usr bin python  tcsh  where cd cd is a shell built-in  usr bin cd

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If you re using Bash or zsh  use this   type -a lshw   This will show whether the target is a builtin  a function  an alias or an external executable  If the latter  it will show each place it appears in your PATH   bash  type -a lshw lshw is  usr bin lshw bash  type -a ls ls is aliased to  ls --color auto  ls is  bin ls bash  zsh zsh  type -a which which is a shell builtin which is  usr bin which   In Bash  for functions type -a will also display the function definition  You can use declare -f functionname to do the same thing  you have to use that for zsh  since type -a doesn t

User · Answer

Like this   which lshw   To see all of the commands that match in your path   which -a lshw

User · Answer

PATH is an environment variable  and can be displayed with the echo command   echo  PATH   It s a list of paths separated by the colon character      The which command tells you which file gets executed when you run a command   which lshw   sometimes what you get is a path to a symlink  if you want to trace that link to where the actual executable lives  you can use readlink and feed it the output of which   readlink -f   which lshw    The -f parameter instructs readlink to keep following the symlink recursively   Here s an example from my machine     which firefox  usr bin firefox    readlink -f   which firefox   usr lib firefox-3 6 3 firefox sh

[linux] Shell - How to find directory of some command?

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