How to check if command exist in a Bash/Shell script

Creating Bash or Shell script for validating whether some command exists or not, can be necessary in some cases. Here I’m going to give you a quick example of how can you achieve it.

Prerequisites

• Linux
• sudo privileges

Solution

I’ve created a bash script that checks whether the telnet command exists or not. There are two cases:

1. If doesn’t exist proceed with the installation.
2. If exist, print that.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

if ! command -v telnet &> /dev/null
then
    echo "Telnet could not be found. Installing it ..."
  #  installation part
else
    echo "Telnet is installed"
fi

Conclusion

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