How to easily find the full path of a command in Ubuntu

 

If you’re writing scripts or making cron jobs you will need to know the full path of the commands you’re using; rather than just being able to use “ls” you would have to use “/bin/ls” instead. You could use the find command here but there’s a quicker and more elegant way: which. Use it like so:

 

which ls

 

will return:

 

/bin/ls

 

Not everything will be in /bin, e.g.:

 

which timeout

 

will likely return:

 

/usr/bin/timeout

 

Simple but it will make your life quite a bit easier when writing scripts, particularly with new commands or command which you don’t use often.