tinywhich

A library for locating files in the directories specified by the PATH (or Path) environment variable.

Supports Windows' PATHEXT environment variable.

A smaller (50kb -> 7kb), faster alternative to which.

Installation

pnpm

pnpm add tinywhich

yarn

yarn add tinywhich

npm

npm install tinywhich

bun

bun add tinywhich

Usage

import { which } from "tinywhich"
// const { which } = require("tinywhich")

which("node") // "[absolute path]/node"
which("notfound") // null

Comparison

pkg	install size	bundle size	bench (linux)	bench (windows)
tinywhich	7kb	552b	19µs	216µs
which	50kb (x7)	3.88kb (x7)	60µs (x3 (sync))	960µs (x4.5 (sync))

• Benchmarks can be found in ./bench
• Windows benchmark was run on 9800X3D + NVMe SSD, Node v22, with 44 directories in PATH, and default PATHEXT
• Linux benchmark was run on a standard GH workflows runner