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Re: which vs. type, and recursion?

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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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Re: which vs. type, and recursion? Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-09-04 11:30 +0200
  Re: which vs. type, and recursion? Richard Hector <richard@walnut.gen.nz> - 2021-09-04 12:00 +0200

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