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type – Display A Command's Type
The type command is a shell builtin that displays the kind of command the shell will execute, given a particular command name. It works like this:
type command
type command
where “command” is the name of the command you want to examine. Here are some ex- amples:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ type type type is a shell builtin [me@linuxbox ~]$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=tty' [me@linuxbox ~]$ type cp
cp is /bin/cp
[me@linuxbox ~]$ type type type is a shell builtin [me@linuxbox ~]$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=tty' [me@linuxbox ~]$ type cp
cp is /bin/cp
Here we see the results for three different commands. Notice that the one for ls (taken from a Fedora system) and how the ls command is actually an alias for the ls command with the “-- color=tty” option added. Now we know why the output from ls is displayed in color!