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up vote 6 down vote favorite

I have command foo, how can I know if it's binary, a function or alias?

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Related: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85249/… –  slm♦ Sep 1 '13 at 13:28

2 Answers 2

up vote 10 down vote accepted

If you're on Bash (or another Bourne-like shell), you can use type. 

type command

will tell you whether command is a shell built-in, alias (and if so, aliased to what), function (and if so it will list the function body) or stored in a file (and if so, the path to the file).

For more information on a "binary" file, you can do

file "$(type -P command)" 2>/dev/null

This will return nothing if command is an alias, function or shell built-in but returns more information if it's a script or a compiled binary.

References

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up vote 2 down vote

The answer will depends on which shell you're using.

For zsh, shell builtin whence -w will tell you exactly what you want

e.g.

$ whence -w whence
whence : builtin
$ whence -w man     
man : command
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