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WHEREIS(1) General Commands Manual WHEREIS(1)

whereislocate programs

whereis [-a] name ...

The whereis utility checks the standard binary directories for the specified name, printing out the paths of any it finds that are executable by the user.

The path searched is:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin

If the -a flag is given, whereis will return a list of all matches instead of just the first match.

The whereis utility exits with one of the following values:

0
All names were successfully resolved.
1
Some names were resolved but not all.
2
No names were resolved.

apropos(1), find(1), locate(1), which(1)

The whereis command first appeared in 2BSD, but the original version was legally tainted and was not included as part of the 4.4BSD release, such that most of the original functionality was lost.

The -a option first appeared in OpenBSD 2.3.

The original version was written by Bill Joy.

July 11, 2019 OpenBSD-current