Inconsistencies with which command

Question

I'm using the n tool to update my current version of node, but something strange is happening.

I ran sudo n latest which in theory fetches the latest version of Node (v0.12.0 and installs it somewhere that's already on my $PATH.

However, running node -v shows v0.10.25. I figured that there was another version of the node exe somewhere else on my path.

which node shows /usr/local/bin/node.

$ cd /usr/local/bin/node
$ node -v
v0.10.25
$ ./node -v
v0.12.0

It's there and installed and /usr/local/bin is on my $PATH.

In what case would which point to the wrong binary?

I've restarted bash and made sure that there are no dud node binaries in /bin or /usr/bin. Also made sure that it wasn't a symlink.

$ ls -lah | grep node
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  20M Feb 14 14:56 node

And that it definitely was a binary.

$ file node
node: ELF 64-bit LSB  executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, not stripped

Ideas?

Answer 1

You look for complicated solutions and you miss the glaringly obvious.

I switched into zsh to see whether the issue was with bash. The node version was correct.

I had alias node=nodejs in ~/.bash_aliases...

Obivously which doesn't take that into account. I think there was some issue with the apt-get package for Node with Ubuntu, which created nodejs binaries rather than node. Obviously I'd aliased it rather than symlinking.

Lesson learned.