Question

On some machines I’m using an external executable to format text (it’s named ‘par’).
Therefore I’d like to detect if the executable is installed.

Edit: I just want to detect if the executable is available in my .vimrc itself. So I prefer internal functions over external utils like ‘which’. Prince Goulash’s solution is already very helpful and I’m going with it, despite I’d prefer finding the exact path. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the vimscript function executable(), which returns 1 if its argument exists and is executable, and 0 otherwise. It doesn’t return the path of the file, though. See help executable for more info.