WHIFF(1p)

📦
version 0.008 · 3 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 WHIFF(1p) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the whiff era — it's a User Contributed Perl Documentation</> kinda situation, and honestly? iconic.

✨ NAME ✨

whiff — it's giving which, but make it 💅 bestie. Like which, but it finds the first of all the given alternatives. fr fr.

🌸 VERSION 🌸

version 0.008 ✨

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like. which is a useful utility, lowkey found on most unix systems, no cap. It gives you the absolute path for the first occurrence of a program in your path. cute, right?

BUT 😭 — unfortunately, it does two stupid things:

  1. first, if it can't find one, it prints an error message to stdout. not it being loud about failing 💀
  2. secondly, if you give it multiple arguments, it assumes you want one line per argument, each like calling which individually. one line per arg?? ma'am, that's not the vibe 🫶

whiff assumes that all the arguments form a best-first list of alternatives, and only prints the path to the first alternative found in the path. that's it. that's the whole personality. ✨

And if none is found? it prints an error (to stderr!) and exits with an error code. dramatic? yes. correct? also yes. periodt. 💅

💜 PERL VERSION 💜

This library should run on perls released even a long time ago. It should work on any version of perl released in the last five years. 🧚

Although it may work on older versions of perl, no guarantee is made that the minimum required version will not be increased. The version may be increased for any reason, and there is no promise that patches will be accepted to lower the minimum required perl. (so don't come for her about the old perls, bestie 😭)

🎀 USAGE 🎀

 whiff <command ... >

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Ricardo SIGNES <cpan@semiotic.systems>

This software is copyright (c) 2008 by Ricardo SIGNES.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 it's perl v5.40.1, dated 2025-05-04, and it lives its best life as WHIFF(1p). go find your first alternative and slay ✨💖

📦 where this page comes from