‘which’ vs ‘command -v’ in Bash [duplicate]

by

Well…

command is likely built in to your shell, and with the -v option will tell you how your shell will invoke the command specified as its option.

which is an external binary, located at /usr/bin/which which steps through the $PATH environment variable and checks for the existence of a file.

A reason to select the former over the latter is that it avoids a dependency on something that is outside your shell.

The two commands do different things, and you should select the one that more closely matches your needs. For example, if command is built in to your shell, command -v command will indicate this with its output (through the non-existence of path), but which command will try to point to a file on your path, regardless of how command would be interpreted by your shell.

More Related Contents:

  1. Command not found error in Bash variable assignment
  2. Why does shell ignore quoting characters in arguments passed to it through variables? [duplicate]
  3. How can I use a file in a command and redirect output to the same file without truncating it?
  4. How to check if a variable is set in Bash
  5. Why does a space in a variable assignment give an error in Bash? [duplicate]
  6. Return value in a Bash function
  7. Shell equality operators (=, ==, -eq)
  8. What is a simple explanation for how pipes work in Bash?
  9. Indirect variable assignment in bash
  10. Shell script to delete directories older than n days
  11. How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory?
  12. How to extract directory path from file path?
  13. Quick-and-dirty way to ensure only one instance of a shell script is running at a time
  14. Process all arguments except the first one (in a bash script)
  15. What does the Bash operator
  16. Remove duplicate entries in a Bash script [duplicate]
  17. Custom Bash prompt is overwriting itself
  18. Value too great for base (error token is “09”)
  19. How to parse a CSV in a Bash script?
  20. Array intersection in Bash [duplicate]
  21. Capture both stdout and stderr in Bash [duplicate]
  22. Modify config file using bash script
  23. Bash read ignores leading spaces
  24. Using a variable in brace expansion range fed to a for loop
  25. Source files in a bash script
  26. executing shell command in background from script [duplicate]
  27. Waiting for background processes to finish before exiting script
  28. Determine if a function exists in bash
  29. Can I use sed to manipulate a variable in bash?
  30. How to grep for case insensitive string in a file?

Leave a Comment