How Many Versions of "X" Are in my $PATH?

Occasionally I run into a situation where I have more than one executable with the same name installed in my $PATH. This is to be expected, and it’s generally not a problem until the executables are not found in the correct order. And what is the correct order? Usually “correct” is whatever arbitrary order makes sense for the thing that I’m currently doing, but it generally means that I want the thing with the highest version number to be found first.

For instance, the bash that ships with macOS is pretty old, so I generally install whatever homebrew has available and I want to default to that in every case.

$ which -a bash
/opt/homebrew/bin/bash
/bin/bash

Now, if I want to know which version of each is currently installed, I just have to remember the correct incantation for bash. Is it?

• bash version
• bash -v
• bash -V
• exec bash --version
• bash --version

It’s the last one (and also the next to last, which has some cleaner output). Probably the last would have been my first guess, but maybe not, depending on how much of a hurry I am in.

If I’m curious about which versions are actually installed, I just need to copy each path and run --version on it. That’s ok, but it’s a bit clumsy. I could also cobble together some command line magic, but now I’ve really become distracted from the task at hand. Since I have is: an inspector for your environment installed, this becomes a bit easier.

$ is there bash --all
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Path                   ┃ Version ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ /opt/homebrew/bin/bash ┃ 5.2.37  ┃
┃ /bin/bash              ┃ 3.2.57  ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━┛

What if I’d rather see it as JSON?

is there bash --all --json

[
    {
        "path": "/opt/homebrew/bin/bash",
        "version": "5.2.37"
    },
    {
        "path": "/bin/bash",
        "version": "3.2.57"
    }
]

Now I can use jq to get the version of the macOS installed executable.

$ is there bash --all --json | jq '.[1].version'
"3.2.57"

I don’t know offhand why I would want to do that, but the important thing is that I can.

"Numbers" by andymag is licensed under CC BY 2.0

It gets interesting with things I may have even more versions of. Maybe the latest version is not where I think it is:

$ is there perl --all
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Path                          ┃ Version ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ /Users/olaf/.plenv/shims/perl ┃ v5.40.0 ┃
┃ /opt/homebrew/bin/perl        ┃ v5.40.2 ┃
┃ /usr/bin/perl                 ┃ v5.34.1 ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━┛

Possibly this can help me find things that I no longer need. It looks like Mason has been managing my gopls install for a while. I can probably delete the first gopls in my $PATH.

$ is there gopls --all
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Path                                          ┃ Version ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━┫
┃ /Users/olaf/go/bin/gopls                      ┃ 0.15.3  ┃
┃ /Users/olaf/.local/share/nvim/mason/bin/gopls ┃ 0.18.1  ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━┛

Because I work with computers, my days are full of minutia that slow me down. Little quality of life improvements can go a long way towards removing these tiny roadblocks. is: an inspector for your environment may be helpful to you as well.