So I have this command in my $PATH, apachectl. Because I’m on a mac and I’ve installed apache2 through MacPorts, the command that gets found first is my macports install in /opt. Up until now I’ve always known that which apachectl will find that location, but to find any other locations of apachectl I’d usually use locate and egrep together.

Here’s my original workflow, lets find the location of the apachectl being called when I don’t specify a path.

Julius:~ caius$ which apachectl
/opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl

Simple enough. Now lets figure out what other locations there’s an apachectl installed at.

Julius:~ caius$ locate apachectl | egrep "\/apachectl$"
/opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl
/opt/local/var/macports/software/apache2/2.2.11_0+darwin_9/opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl
/usr/sbin/apachectl

Right, so now I know where else a command exists in the filesystem called apachectl, but I don’t know if any of those is in my $PATH, or what order they come in when searching through my $PATH. In this (old) workflow I’d have compared them to my $PATH manually as there’s so few of them.

So I noticed Ali googling for the which man page on IRC, and (quite stupidly) poked fun at him for doing so. I then swallowed my ego and actually followed the link to the man page, and boy was I glad I did. Just shows with even a fairly simple command like which, you sure don’t know everything!

What I discovered was that which has a single flag you can pass it, -a. From the man page:

-a     print all matching pathnames of each argument

Right. So that locate | grep command plus manually figuring out what is in my $PATH is really hard work then. which -a should give us the same results, but a lot faster and with a lot less manual thought.

Julius:~ caius$ which -a apachectl
/opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl
/usr/sbin/apachectl

And hey presto, yet another useful bit of bash knowledge for me, thanks to Ali not being afraid to RTFM!