Re: which vs. type, and recursion?
On Sat 04 Sep 2021 at 21:21:38 +1200, Richard Hector wrote:
> 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.
Use 'help type' and try 'type -a ls'.
--
Brian.
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