Bash: Handling Command Not Found

"After a recent O/S version upgrade (to openSUSE 11.2) I noticed that bash started being a bit more intelligent when I did something stupid: it started giving me a useful error message when I typed the name of a command that wasn't in my PATH but that was in an "sbin" directory. My reaction at the time was "huh, that's nice", but today I decided I needed a bit more information.

As an example of this behavior, if I type ifconfig while not logged in as root I get the get the following:

$ ifconfig
Absolute path to 'ifconfig' is '/sbin/ifconfig'

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