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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

You may also want 'whereis' instead of 'which'.

I use cope to colorize my output, which makes 'which' useless to me for most common commands, but 'whereis' still works.

Edit for examples:

    $ which ip
    /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/auto/share/dist/Cope/ip
    $ whereis ip
    ip: /usr/bin/ip /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/auto/share/dist/Cope/ip /usr/share/man/man7/ip.7.gz /usr/share/man/man8/ip.8.gz

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In bash, there's also:

    command -V

Which knows about aliases and functions as well:

    $ command -V ip
    ip is /sbin/ip
    $ command -V ll
    ll is aliased to `ls -AlF --color=auto'
    $ command -V command_not_found_handle
    command_not_found_handle is a function
    command_not_found_handle ()
    {
        if [ -x /usr/lib/command-not-found ]; then
            /usr/lib/command-not-found -- "$1";
            return $?;
        else
            if [ -x /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found ]; then
                /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found -- "$1";
                return $?;
            else
                printf "%s: command not found\n" "$1" 1>&2;
                return 127;
            fi;
        fi
    }

> whereis

Thanks for this! After 14+ years of using Linux almost daily, I had never heard of this command. I learned something new today, so now it's time to go home!

Yeah, I recently "discovered" the commands 'whatis' [0] and 'apropos' [1] and my experience learning Linux improved quite a bit.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/whatis

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/apropos

Thanks for passing those on as well!

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