I work in an environment that has a lot of legacy shell script magic lying around. One thing used heavy from the command line are bash functions that get sourced from some file included from some file included from some file ... included in my .bash_profile. Is there a way to get the definition or even better the location of the definition of these functions without tracking them down through 5 levels of includes?
5 Answers
To get the function definition:
type -a function_name
-
-
If you're ever in Grand Rapids I'll buy you one in person... otherwise we can find some other way... Jan 23, 2016 at 21:05
-
1
Assuming you have a function named foo the commands below will get the location of the function's definition, that is it will get the name of the file in which the function is defined as well as the line number at which the function is defined within that file.
# Turn on extended shell debugging
shopt -s extdebug
# Dump the function's name, line number and fully qualified source file
declare -F foo
# Turn off extended shell debugging
shopt -u extdebug
In my case the output of these commands is:
foo 32 /source/private/main/developer/cue.pub.sh
-
4Perfect. I just made this into a bash function in my bashrc file.
whereisfunc() {shopt -s extdebug;declare -F $1;shopt -u extdebug}
– NeilFeb 12, 2015 at 3:49 -
7@Neil: That's handy, thanks: let me suggest using a subshell to localize the effect of
shopt
without changing the current shell's state:whichfunc () ( shopt -s extdebug; declare -F "$1"; )
(note the use of(...)
instead of{...}
). Mar 7, 2016 at 21:43 -
-
2
To see the definition of the function (as opposed to where it came from), use:
declare -f <functionname>
-
1I think this one is better than
type -a
because it doesn't print the annoy locale dependent first line~~– yuyichaoMar 16, 2012 at 1:50 -
1but since there's no location given this is an answer to an unasked question—at least unasked here Jan 22, 2016 at 19:29
-
I found this while Googling how to know the defintion of a function ("find definition" is kind of ambiguous) so this answer was useful to me. Jun 3, 2021 at 10:19
bash -x
will dump what bash is running as it starts up, which should let you trace it more easily. Don't forget to exit the newly-opened shell.
-
1Handy stuff; to capture the trace in a file, use
script out.txt bash -x
(again, don't forget toexit
). Mar 8, 2016 at 2:43
another way, that I find even simpler lately:
which <functionname>
(this will also show whether it's an alias or a script, but will not track down the source of an alias)
-
2I don't think
which
gives information about aliases on BSD or mac. Also, this question is about functions, andwhich
does not give information about functions.– dbnApr 8, 2013 at 20:45 -
1Thanks for that note. I see now that "which" only resolves functions in zsh, not bash. Apr 9, 2013 at 1:57
-
2I think this answer is likely to invite downvotes... it doesn't seem to address the question at all, since there's no information on location. Jan 22, 2016 at 19:28
-
I've found it useful for the purpose of tracking down the declaration to use this and find out whether it's an alias or function, and to know the syntax with which it was declared. It's true though that only @HairOfTheDog's answer gives the file directly. Apr 26, 2016 at 19:42