WHICH(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual WHICH(1)
NAME
which - locate a program file in the user's path
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 <
[email protected]>. The current version of which was
rewritten in C by Daniel Papasian <
[email protected]>.
FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8 September 24, 2020 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8