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Manual Pages  — WHICH

NAME

which – locate a program file in the user's path

CONTENTS

SYNOPSIS


which [-as] program ...

DESCRIPTION

The which utility takes a list of command names and searches the path for each executable file that would be run had these commands actually been invoked.

The following options are available:
-a
  List all instances of executables found (instead of just the first one of each).
-s
  No output, just return 0 if all of the executables are found, or 1 if some were not found.

Some shells may provide a builtin which command which is similar or identical to this utility. Consult the builtin(1) manual page.

EXAMPLES

Locate the ls(1) and cp(1) commands: 
$ /usr/bin/which ls cp
/bin/ls
/bin/cp

Same as above with a specific PATH and showing all occurrences: 

$ PATH=/bin:/rescue /usr/bin/which -a ls cp
/bin/ls
/rescue/ls
/bin/cp
/rescue/cp

which will show duplicates if the same executable is found more than once: 

$ PATH=/bin:/bin /usr/bin/which -a ls
/bin/ls
/bin/ls

Do not show output. Just exit with an appropriate return code: 

$ /usr/bin/which -s ls cp
$ echo $?
0


$ /usr/bin/which -s fakecommand
$ echo $?
1

SEE ALSO

builtin(1), csh(1), find(1), locate(1), whereis(1)

HISTORY

The which command first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1 .

AUTHORS

The which utility was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider <Mt wosch@FreeBSD.org>. The current version of which was rewritten in C by Daniel Papasian <Mt dpapasia@andrew.cmu.edu>.
WHICH (1) September 24, 2020
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