Bash: Handling Command Not Found | Linux Today
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Bash: Handling Command Not Found

Written By
MF
Mitch Frazier
Apr 24, 2010

“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’

Complete
Story
MF

Mitch Frazier

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