How To Find The Location Of An Executable Program In The Mac Terminal

The Mac platform is amazing, and what makes it even more powerful is that it’s running on Unix, so you have the incredible power of bash and the shell terminal at your disposal. For instance, what takes 5 clicks and 30 minutes of your time might just be solved by running one command in Terminal – and that’s underestimating it.

Take for instance, this scenario: Sometimes you’ll need to find out the path of something in Terminal when you’re using your Mac, and there’s an easy way to do that. The command’s which, and you use it in this manner:

which

For example, if I wanted to find out the location of the wget program, I just type “which wget” in Terminal, and the command will output something like the following:

/usr/local/bin/wget

Simple!

Alvin Poh

I've over 17 years of entrepreneurship experience, having built a tech company to be the top in the country, which was subsequently acquired for an 8-figure sum. As CEO, I led the company through robust growth to 150 employees across 4 countries. After the acquisition, I embraced minimalism, sold off my personal possessions, and started living around the world. Read more about my story here.