On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > The type command huh! you learn something new everyday. As long as you > > are learning you can't die. At least that is my theory. > > > > But the which command works on my FC3 system. might as well toss in my $0.02 here. on most systems, "which" is an external executable, while "type" is a shell builtin: $ type type $ type which normally, this means that "which" can only tell you about other external executables, while "type" can tell you about aliases, shell functions and shell builtins as well, which makes it significantly more useful. in effect, because "type" lives inside the shell, it can tell you about other things inside the shell, while "which" is restricted to telling you about just the externals. if that's all you care about, fine. in some cases, "which" is actually aliased to try to get back inside the shell, as in: $ alias which alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only ... etc etc. what this is doing is (kind of) cheating to reach back inside the shell to get at the current aliases. which works, but it clearly can't help you with builtins or shell functions: $ which type # won't find it and that's pretty much the story. rday
