Wednesday, October 17

How to find command location in Linux


This is a small how to on finding your command location. Some times its required to find command location to use it as path is not set properly to /bin or /sbin or some other folder. And some times we install packages through scripts where the commands will be installed in a defined path other than /usr/bin or /usr/sbin etc.
command to check where the particular command is installed?
which command-name
Example:
which ls
Output:
root@surendra:/home/surendra# which ls
/bin/ls
root@surendra:/home/surendra#
How about getting with other command along with manual pages?
whereis command-name
Example:
whereis ls
Output:
root@surendra:/home/surendra# whereis ls
ls: /bin/ls /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz
root@surendra:/home/surendra#
some times we don’t know where the command is located but still we want to use it, at these times you can use which command to give entire path
`which ls`
or
$(which ls)
the above two are very much handy when writing shell scripts when you are not aware/sure where the command located. Please share your thoughts on how you avoid this situation.

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