How do I find the path to a program in Terminal?
You can use type
and which
to determine what a certain command in bash
is, and, if it's an application, where it resides.
$ type type
type is a shell builtin
$ type cd
cd is a shell builtin
$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=auto'
$ type -P ls
/Users/danielbeck/bin/ls
$ which which
/usr/bin/which
$ which ls
/Users/danielbeck/bin/ls
The commands which
and type -P
only work for programs on your PATH
, of course, but you won't be able to run others by just typing their command name anyway.
If you're looking for a simple way to determine where an OS X (GUI) application bundle is installed (as used e.g. by the open
command), you can execute the following short AppleScript from the command line:
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to POSIX path of (file of process "Safari" as alias)'
/Applications/Safari.app
This requires that the program in question (Safari in the example) is running.
This is the method I currently to locate the Firefox application directory in OSX and Linux. Should be easy to adopt to another application. Tested on OSX 10.7, Ubuntu 12.04, Debian Jessie
#!/bin/bash
# Array of possible Firefox application names.
appnames=("IceWeasel" "Firefox") # "Firefox" "IceWeasel" "etc
#
# Calls lsregister -dump and parses the output for "/Firefox.app", etc.
# Returns the very first result found.
#
function get_osx_ffdir()
{
# OSX Array of possible lsregister command locations
# I'm only aware of this one currently
lsregs=("/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister")
for i in "${lsregs[@]}"; do
for j in ${appnames[@]}; do
if [ -f $i ]; then
# Some logic to parse the output from lsregister
ffdir=$($i -dump |grep -E "/$j.app$" |cut -d'/' -f2- |head -1)
ffdir="/$ffdir"
return 0
fi
done
done
return 1
}
#
# Uses "which" and "readlink" to locate firefox on Linux, etc
#
function get_ffdir()
{
for i in "${appnames[@]}"; do
# Convert "Firefox" to "firefox", etc
lower=$(echo "$i" |tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
# Readlink uses the symlink to find the actual install location
# will need to be removed for non-symlinked applications
exec=$(readlink -f "$(which $lower)")
# Assume the binary's parent folder is the actual application location
ffdir=$(echo "$exec" |rev |cut -d'/' -f2- |rev)
if [ -f "$ffdir" ]; then
return 0
fi
done
return 1
}
echo "Searching for Firefox..."
ffdir=""
if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin"* ]]; then
# Mac OSX
get_osx_ffdir
else
# Linux, etc
get_ffdir
fi
echo "Found application here: $ffdir"
# TODO: Process failures, i.e. "$ffdir" == "" or "$?" != "0", etc
If the program is running, you can call
ps -ef | grep PROGRAM