How to know if a specific command (e.g. bc) is available in an original Ubuntu?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 09:59:31 +0800, 孙世龙 sunshilong wrote:
>I have to invoke the commands that are available on Ubuntu 16.04(i.e
>the commands that need to be manually installed should not be called).
>
>How to know if a specific command (e.g. bc) is available in an
>original Ubuntu 16.04?

You could run a clean Ubuntu 16.04 live DVD and list the relevant paths
of PATH.

[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ ls /usr/sbin /usr/bin /sbin /bin | sort -u
[snip]

However, do you want to do this to achieve anything in particular?
Maybe you should focus on essential packages and/or at LSB. I don't know
if LSB is installed by default, but it could be a starting point if you
should have a particular goal.

Package: coreutils (8.25-2ubuntu3~16.04) [essential]
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/amd64/coreutils/filelist


http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/en/man8/lsb.8.html
                                    ^^^^^
                                    xenial links is broken

https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/lsb
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/lsb-core

"LSB elements

Elements of the operating system the LSB specifies include:

    [snip]
    Core commands and utilities
    [snip]" -
    https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/linux-standard-base.htm

[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ lsb_release
LSB Version:	core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:core-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-amd64:security-9.20160110ubuntu0.2-noarch