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Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere"

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On Wed, 19 Apr 2017, Richard Owlett wrote:

> I've had two instances recently. I've found the "immediately" needed 
> information, but they are samples of more generic problems.
>
> 1. Today's problem was easily solved. I had seen a post discussing an 
> application of the "tree" command. When I tried it, I got "command not 
> found". In _this_ case it was easily solved by using Synaptic's search 
> function -- there is a package named "tree".
>
> However that is not always the case. Some months ago I got a "command not 
> found" message for a command that had a man page (do not recall the specific 
> command). It turned out it was one utility command among many provided by a 
> package with an unrelated name.

It is unclear to me what state of affairs you describe here.

When you say you "got a 'command not found' message" for "a command
that had a manpage", do you mean the man page was, at the time,
already *installed* on your system?

In such a case, my first assumption would be that the executable in
question was already installed, but simply wasn't in the user's path.

> Is there a general way to find such a package?

To this particular question, I have nothing to add that has not
already been said.

> 2. There are many commands whose man pages point to using the "info" command. 
> I personally find that format more annoying than useful. I would prefer to 
> access the TeXInfo formatted document and convert it locally to desired 
> format - usually HTML.
>
> If the command is on my machine (i.e. GRUB), I can generally find the 
> associated TeXInfo formatted file (usually concealed in a tarred or zipped 
> file).

Doing

  $ info -w COMMAND

should tell you the location of COMMAND's info files, painlessly,
provided its info files are correctly installed locally already.

The '-w' stands for '--where'.

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Thread

Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-04-19 16:10 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2017-04-19 16:30 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2017-04-19 16:40 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2017-04-19 16:40 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> - 2017-04-19 16:50 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu> - 2017-04-19 17:20 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2017-04-19 18:10 +0200
  Re: Efficiently finding information 'known' to exist "somewhere" davidson@freevolt.org - 2017-04-19 20:40 +0200

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