* note i'm truncating the output of these commands as an example *

the posix way is to use "command":

there's also "whereis":


the "locate" command finds files by name:


but "which" is my favorite:

you can use the "find" utility with the name flag:

you also have other tools you can install to aid in your searching.

"ag", the silver searcher, can search file contents (default) or file and location names with the -g flag

you can get the same results with ack, but it's much slower.

you can also search the inverse way looking for binaries by man page topics using "apropos":


package managers can also give you some good info:

on arch "pacman" can display a file install location list based on package name:

if you use an "rpm" based distribution (centOS, rhel, SUSE, opensuse, etc):


if you use a "dpkg" based dist (debian, ubuntu and it's derivatives):