Question

On *nix, using BASH (etc) you ask the system where a command is located (etc) by using the ‘type’ shell built-in like this:

$ type cat
cat is /bin/cat

Is there an equivalent of this ‘type’ command in Microsoft PowerShell 2.0 ?

Answer 1

An equivalent is Get-Command.

PS C:\> Get-Command ls

CommandType     Name       Definition
-----------     ----       ----------
Alias           ls         Get-ChildItem
Application     ls.exe     D:\usr\local\wbin\ls.exe
Application     ls.exe     C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\ls.exe

Windows 10 Update:

Since I’ve posted this answer, it appears that the behavior of Get-Command has changed. To include all results (in the style of Un*x) type), now I need to pass the -All flag, like so:

PS C:\> Get-Command -All ls

CommandType     Name                 Version    Source
-----------     ----                 -------    ------
Alias           ls -> Get-ChildItem
Application     ls.exe               0.0.0.0    C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\usr\bin\ls.exe

As noted in a comment, this doesn’t include the Definition column as was the previous behavior. I can’t determine a command-line argument to add the definition column, but as noted by @voutasaurus in the comment below, one can use:

PS C:\> (Get-Command -All ls).Definition
Get-ChildItem
C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\usr\bin\ls.exe

Version information for reference (I odn’t have the version information associated with the original answer text, but I’m guessing that it was Windows 7):

PS C:\> [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
10     0      15063  0