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Is there a way to detect if an external command exists (i.e. wget, svn)?

More specifically today, i was trying to run one of my scripts i wrote and the person didn't have wget or svn installed.

The script just downloads a file extracts it or uses svn to export the trunk.

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wget and svn are not functions, they're external commands (also called utilities, which includes built-in utilities). Functions are defined by shell code and live inside the current shell instance. External commands are stored in executable files and can be implemented in any language. – Gilles Sep 1 '11 at 23:53
Thank you. I wasn't sure about the terminology there; still have a lot to learn. – chrisjlee Sep 2 '11 at 1:29
If you are using Ubuntu or Debian you may be interested in the command-not-found package. – Faheem Mitha Sep 4 '11 at 1:10

1 Answer

up vote 13 down vote accepted

In Bash the type shell built-in gives information about the executable things: aliases, functions, executables. See help type for details.

# just check for existence
type -t 'yourfunction' > /dev/null || echo 'error: yourfunction not found'

# explicitly check for given type
[[ "$( type -t 'yourfunction' )" != 'function' ]] && \
    echo 'error: yourfunction not found or is not a function'
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