Find the path of a shell command

[Grant Edwards]

On 2022-10-15, Andreas Eder <a_eder_muc at web.de> wrote:
> On Mi 12 Okt 2022 at 05:00, Paulo da Silva <p_d_a_s_i_l_v_a_ns at nonetnoaddress.pt> wrote:
>
>> The simple question: How do I find the full path of a shell command
>> (linux), i.e. how do I obtain the corresponding of, for example,
>> "type rm" in command line?
>>
>> The reason:
>> I have python program that launches a detached rm. It works pretty
>> well until it is invoked by cron! I suspect that for cron we need
>> to specify the full path.

> Why not just use os.unlink ?

Because he's using 'rm' to recursively remove a large directory tree
many levels deep.

One might think that could be done by 

   os.removedirs(name)
       Remove directories recursively. [...]

But it doesn't appear so from the description:

    Works like rmdir() except that, if the leaf directory is
    successfully removed, removedirs() tries to successively remove
    every parent directory mentioned in path until an error is raised
    (which is ignored, because it generally means that a parent
    directory is not empty). For example, os.removedirs('foo/bar/baz')
    will first remove the directory 'foo/bar/baz', and then remove
    'foo/bar' and 'foo' if they are empty. Raises OSError if the leaf
    directory could not be successfully removed.