command-not-found, a tool that has been made for ROSA is now also available in OpenMandriva Lx repository (at this time, only development version).
What is this package about?
It may arrive that you need to launch a command inside a terminal, even if you’re a new user, sometimes things are done quicker with a simple command.
Sometimes you can see this message «command not found». This can happen for several reasons, for example, a necessary package is not installed, or there is a typo. Many other distributions are already able to return a message such as: “this command needs the package xxx to be installed”. This avoid to investigate for finding the correct package, if it exists.
Thanks to “command-not-found”, as an example, if you ask for a non existing “foo” command (or make a typo), here is what you get
$ foo
No command ‘foo’ found, did you mean:
Command ‘fio’ from package ‘fio’ (contrib)
Command ‘fop’ from package ‘fop’ (main, installed)
Command ‘for’ from package ‘execline’ (contrib)
Command ‘zoo’ from package ‘zoo’ (restricted)
Notice that not only is returned a list of close looking command, but also informs if the package is already installed or not.
If you ask for an actual command, but being part of a non installed package:
$ zoo
Command ‘zoo’ can be found in:
package ‘zoo’ (restricted)
You can install it by typing:
urpmi zoo
Do you want to install it? (y/N)
If you want to install the package, just type “y”. By default, no is selected.
One more command-not-found feature is analysis of installed packages:
$ ifconfig
Command ‘ifconfig’ can be found in:
package ‘net-tools’ (main, installed)
File /sbin/ifconfig exists! Check your PATH variable, or call it using an absolute path.
Last, but not least, command-not-found comes with a little utility called “cnf”. Using cnf in conjunction with the name of a command will give you the same informations without executing the command. Very useful to quickly know from which package an installed command is coming. For example, “cnf screen” will tell you from which package comes the command screen, without launching it.
Until we have a full documentation in our wiki, you can find more informations in ROSA Wiki