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

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On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 08:59:18AM -0500, 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.
>
>Is there a general way to find such a package?

There is a package called "command-not-found" which hooks into the shell
such that, instead of a message like "blah: command not found", you get
something more informative along the lines of "blah was not found, but
there's an executable called blah in the 'libblah-bin' package".
"command-not-found" is, I believe, installed by default on Ubuntu.

>
>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). How to search for all TeXInfo files on debian.org?

I believe the standard location for these is /usr/share/info.

>
>

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For more information, please reread.

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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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