sma_which — Locate executable in PATH

Theme: Configure
Who Is It For? System Administrator

What is it?

sma_which searches the directories listed in the PATH environment variable to locate the full path of a specified executable, and prints the result to standard output.

Use sma_which in OpCon job scripts when you need to confirm the resolved path of a program before calling it, or to make scripts portable across machines where executables may be installed in different locations.

Syntax

sma_which <program_name>

Argument	Description
<program_name>	The name of the executable to locate. Can be a bare name (bash), a relative path (./myscript), or an absolute path (/usr/bin/python3).

Behavior

• If <program_name> is an absolute path, sma_which verifies that the file exists and returns the path directly.
• If <program_name> is a relative path (starts with ./), sma_which resolves it relative to the current directory.
• Otherwise, sma_which searches each directory in the PATH environment variable in order and returns the first match found.
• The full path is printed to standard output.

Example

The following script uses sma_which to locate python3 before calling it:

PYTHON=$(sma_which python3)
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "python3 not found in PATH"
    exit 1
fi
$PYTHON /data/scripts/process.py

Exit codes

Code	Condition
0	Success — the executable was found; full path printed to stdout
10	The executable was not found in PATH or at the specified path