Mastering Linux Shell Scripting

The bash command hierarchy

When working on at the bash shell and when you are sitting comfortably at your prompt eagerly waiting to type a command, you will most likely feel that it is a simple matter of typing and hitting the Enter key. You should know better than to think that things are never quite as simple as we imagine.

Command type

For example, if we type and enter ls to list files, it will be reasonable to think that we were running the command. It is possible, but we will be running an alias often. Aliases exist in memory as a shortcut to commands or commands with options; these aliases are used before we even check for the file. The bash shell built-in command type can come to our aid here. The type command will display the type of command ...