Bash – How to find the path to an executable in OSX

bashmac-osxterminal

Is there a command I can use to easily find the path to an executable? I'm looking for identify on my local machine – something like pwd?

pwd identify
=> /usr/local/bin/identify

Best Answer

which will search your path for the arguments you supply, it's found on just about any BSD or SysV UNIX

moriarty:~ dave$ which bash true false
/bin/bash
/usr/bin/true
/usr/bin/false

Related Solutions

How to set the global PATH environment variable on OS X

palmer's GUI information is correct, but there is a more maintainable way to modify the path seen by the shell. Like mediaslave said, you can edit /etc/paths, but even better you can drop a text file in /etc/paths.d/ that has a path in it and all shells will construct the path correctly.

For example, on my system:

$ cat /etc/paths
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/usr/local/bin
$ ls /etc/paths.d
X11       git      postgres
$ cat /etc/paths.d/postgres
/Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin
$ echo $PATH
/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin

Getting full path of executables in ‘ps auxwww’ output

Try this instead:

ps ax -o pid,cmd

You can reformat it as you wish (read the man page for details).

Finally, I think that ps (and even cat /proc/*/cmdline) will report the command the way it was launched. So if no full path was given, it will appear as just "command" instead of "/path/to/command".

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to set the global PATH environment variable on OS X

Getting full path of executables in ‘ps auxwww’ output

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