Question

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?

Answer 1

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.