Re: 'whence' question

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 10:16 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>
> FIRST OCCURRENCE  OF FILES ONLY? I'D EXPECT THE '-m' FORM TO BE
> THE DEFAULT, THE DOC IS CLEAR THAT ALL COMMAND FORMS ARE
> SEARCHED.

I'm not sure what you're hollering about.  Searching all forms has
nothing to do with whether the search is for a literal string (which
is the default) or for a pattern (which requires the -m option to be
explicitly stated).  "All command forms" means aliases, reserved
words, and functions, and your example found those aliases.

> $ whence zsh*
> /usr/local/bin/zsh
> /usr/local/bin/zsh-RayStyle1

I'm 99.75% sure that you'd see

$ echo zsh*
zsh
zsh-RayStyle1

and that this is entirely the reason you get the above result from whence.

> $ whence  "zsh*"
> (nothing)

Well, yeah.  You did not specify -m and there is no command or
function whose name literally is zee ess aitch star, so whence found
nothing.

> REMOVE  '-v' AND ALIASES 'BECOME' FILES! :(

Well, no, they don't become files, the become whatever is on the
right-hand-side of the alias.

% alias zsh='echo good golly miss molly'
% whence -a zsh
echo good golly miss molly
/bin/zsh

It's not the fault of "whence" that you don't find this to be as
useful as the -v output.