unixshellposix

Find out if a command exists on POSIX system


I want to be able to tell if a command exists on any POSIX system from a shell script.

On Linux, I can do the following:

if which <command>; then
   ...snip...
fi

However, Solaris and MacOS which do not give an exit failure code when the command does not exist, they just print an error message to STDOUT.

Also, I recently discovered that the which command itself is not POSIX (see http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html)

Any ideas?


Solution

  • command -v is a POSIX specified command that does what which does.

    It is defined to to return >0 when the command is not found or an error occurs.