Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Ubuntu "command not found" magic

Via Alan Pope's blog: Ubuntu Edgy and above includes a "command not found magic" -- a bash hook that intercepts 'command not found' errors and replaces them with more useful messages, such as what packages you need to install to get that command. I tried it on my Edgy laptop and what do you know, it actually works.

First you need to apt-get the command-not-found package:

$ sudo apt-get install command-not-found
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
command-not-found-data
The following NEW packages will be installed:
command-not-found command-not-found-data
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded.
Need to get 471kB/475kB of archives.
After unpacking 6263kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com edgy/universe command-not-found-data 0.1.0 [471kB]
Fetched 300kB in 2s (109kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package command-not-found-data.
(Reading database ... 92284 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking command-not-found-data (from .../command-not-found-data_0.1.0_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package command-not-found.
Unpacking command-not-found (from .../command-not-found_0.1.0_all.deb) ...
Setting up command-not-found-data (0.1.0) ...
Setting up command-not-found (0.1.0) ...

Then you need to open a new shell window, so that the hook gets installed. In that window, try running some commands which are part of packages that you don't yet have installed. For example:

$ nmap
The program 'nmap' is currently not installed, you can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install nmap

$ snort
The program 'snort' can be found in the following packages:
* snort-pgsql
* snort-mysql
* snort
Try: sudo apt-get install

Pretty cool, huh. And of course the bash hook is written in Python.

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