which

Find out where a program lives

What it does

which shows the full path of the program a name runs, such as /usr/bin/python3. The shell looks for programs in the folders listed in PATH, in order, and which prints the first match.

It helps when several versions are installed and you are not sure which one runs, or when a command is "not found" and you want to check whether it exists at all.

Syntax

which <program>

Examples

• Find out where the python3 program lives

  which python3

  • which — path to a program from PATH
  • python3 — program name

Related commands

• env — List environment variables
• export — Set an environment variable for the programs you run
• find — Find files and folders by name, type and more

Practise · All commands