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.