alt Hacker NewsI'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH.
Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?"
I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.
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aflag • yesterday at 9:06 PM
I thought Ubuntu did that, but not Debian. Still, that's very different than what the author mentioned
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This is generally called a command-not-found handler and are a feature of all the major shells (though the exact details differ, the general idea is to define a function with a specific reserved name), and most majors distros have ones that can be installed, even if they aren't by default.
I wrote my own (much faster) such handler for Arch Linux. I even wrote a blog post about the design: https://vorpal.se/posts/2025/mar/25/filkoll-the-fastest-comm...