whereis Command: Tutorial & Examples

Display the location of a command, file, or manual page

The whereis command in Linux is a command-line utility that is used to locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a given command. The basic syntax for the command is whereis [command].

When you run whereis command followed by a command name, it will search through the standard Linux directories for binary, source, and manual page files related to that command and will print the path of those files if they are found.

For example, if you run the command whereis ls, it will return the location of the binary, source and manual page files for the ls command, for example /bin/ls and /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz.

The whereis command is useful when you are trying to find the location of a command that is not in your current PATH environment variable or when you want to know the location of the source code of a command.

It is important to note that the whereis command only searches through a predefined set of directories, so it may not find all files related to a command if they are located in a non-standard directory or if the command is not installed on the system. To search also in other directories, you may use the find command.