 Examples of type command | |
| Original author(s) | AT&T Corporation |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
| Initial release | 1984 |
| Operating system | Unix and Unix-like |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Command |
In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, type is a command that describes how its arguments would be interpreted if used as command names.
Where applicable, type will display the command name's path. Possible command types are:
The command returns a non-zero exit status if command names cannot be found.
$typetesttest is a shell builtin$type cp cp is /bin/cp$type unknown unknown not found$typetypetype is a shell builtinThe type command was a shell builtin for Bourne shell that was introduced in AT&T's System V Release 2 (SVR2) in 1984, [1] and continues to be included in many other POSIX-compatible shells such as Bash. However, type is not part of the POSIX standard. With a POSIX shell, similar behavior is retrieved with
command -V name
In the KornShell, the command whence provides similar functionality. [2]
The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities. [3]
 | The Wikibook Guide to Unix has a page on the topic of: Commands |
Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions and all releases of Apple's macOS prior to macOS Catalina. A version is also available for Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is also the default user shell in Solaris 11.
Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled and run natively with minimal modification.
KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983. The initial development was based on Bourne shell source code. Other early contributors were Bell Labs developers Mike Veach and Pat Sullivan, who wrote the Emacs and vi-style line editing modes' code, respectively. KornShell is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell, inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines the application programming interface (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility with variants of Unix and other operating systems.
A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by the Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text. A script which sets up the environment, runs the program, and does any necessary cleanup, logging, etc. is called a wrapper.
A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. The shell is both an interactive command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to control the execution of the system using shell scripts.
The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
The C shell is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which Joy first distributed in 1978. Other early contributors to the ideas or the code were Michael Ubell, Eric Allman, Mike O'Brien and Jim Kulp.
In Unix-like and some other operating systems, the pwd command writes the full pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.
basename is a standard computer program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. When basename is given a pathname, it will delete any prefix up to the last slash ('/') character and return the result. basename is described in the Single UNIX Specification and is primarily used in shell scripts.
uname is a computer program in Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that prints the name, version and other details about the current machine and the operating system running on it.
MinGW, formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. The development of the MinGW project has been forked with the creation in 2005–2008 of an alternative project called Mingw-w64.
printf format string refers to a control parameter used by a class of functions in the input/output libraries of C and many other programming languages. The string is written in a simple template language: characters are usually copied literally into the function's output, but format specifiers, which start with a % character, indicate the location and method to translate a piece of data to characters.
In computing, kill is a command that is used in several popular operating systems to send signals to running processes.
test is a command-line utility found in Unix, Plan 9, and Unix-like operating systems that evaluates conditional expressions. test was turned into a shell builtin command in 1981 with UNIX System III and at the same time made available under the alternate name [.
In computing, alias is a command in various command-line interpreters (shells), which enables a replacement of a word by another string. It is mainly used for abbreviating a system command, or for adding default arguments to a regularly used command. alias is available in Unix shells, AmigaDOS, 4DOS/4NT, KolibriOS, Windows PowerShell, ReactOS, and the EFI shell. Aliasing functionality in the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems is provided by the DOSKey command-line utility.
In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark at the beginning of a script. It is also called sha-bang, hashbang, pound-bang, or hash-pling.
In computing, which is a command for various operating systems used to identify the location of executables. The command is available in Unix and Unix-like systems, the AROS shell, for FreeDOS and for Microsoft Windows. The functionality of the which command is similar to some implementations of the type command. POSIX specifies a command named command that also covers this functionality.
UWIN is a computer software package created by David Korn which allows programs written for the operating system Unix to be built and run on Microsoft Windows with few, if any, changes. Some of the software development was subcontracted to Wipro, India. References, correct or not, to the software as U/Win and AT&T Unix for Windows can be found in some cases, especially from the early days of its existence.
getopts is a built-in Unix shell command for parsing command-line arguments. It is designed to process command line arguments that follow the POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines, based on the C interface of getopt.
whence [...] Korn shell only. Show whether each command is a Unix command, a built-in command, a defined shell function, or an alias.
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| Processes | |
| User environment | |
| Text processing | |
| Shell builtins | |
| Searching | |
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| Software development | |
| Miscellaneous | |
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