anywhich

A which that finds what is installed on your system, even when it is not on $PATH. The command you type is anyw.

which stops at $PATH and only shows the first hit. On a machine with more than one package manager, a binary can be installed and still come back empty. anyw walks all of $PATH, shows every match in order, and tells you which one runs.

Linux works today, with resolvers for pacman, apt, dnf, zypper, apk, xbps, Flatpak, Snap, Nix, npm -g, deno, uv, pnpm, bun, cargo install, go install, and pipx. Windows lookups follow PATHEXT (.exe, .bat, .cmd); the Scoop, Chocolatey, and WinGet resolvers are fixture-tested only. macOS is untested.

Windows binaries are cross-compiled on CI and attached to each GitHub release: anyw.exe for x64 Windows, no Visual Studio or MinGW needed on the installing machine. Linux builds ship as a tarball the same way.

Usage

$ anyw bat

PATH:
  1. /usr/bin/bat -> pacman: bat 0.25.0-1 (active)
  2. /home/rokuroo/.cargo/bin/bat -> cargo: bat 0.24.0

Currently resolves to: /usr/bin/bat (pacman: bat 0.25.0-1)

Not found:

$ anyw foobar

No matches in PATH.
foobar is not installed via any known source.

Exit code is 1 when nothing matches, so it works in scripts.

Flags

• --plain: no color, scriptable output.
• --why: one reason line under each PATH entry explaining why it ranked there.

Building

cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/anyw. Run the tests with cargo test.

Releases: push a tag (git tag v0.2.0 && git push origin v0.2.0) and the release workflow builds both platforms and attaches the binaries to the GitHub release. The tag must match the version in Cargo.toml; the workflow checks and fails the run otherwise.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.