Greg Wooledge pointed out in another thread that 'type' is often better
than 'which' for finding out what kind of command you're about to run,
and where it comes from.
A quick test, however, threw up another issue:
richard@zircon:~$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=auto'
Great, so it's an alias. But what is the underlying ls? How do I find
out? I did find out, by unaliasing ls and trying again, which showed
that it's an actual executable, /usr/bin/ls, and not a shell builtin.
But is there an easier/better way? Can 'type' be asked to recursively
decode aliases?
I looked at the relevant section of bash(1) (when I eventually found
it), but was not particularly enlightened.