How to Disable Ubuntu command-not-found

Ubuntu, in all its helpfulness, has a feature that tries to guess what you mean when you type commands at the bash prompt. If you type a command that's found, it runs it, of course. If you type a command that it can't find, it takes a moment to search available packages for install and suggest what you might do to make that command available. It sometimes looks like this: 

$ foo
No command 'foo' found, did you mean:
 Command 'xoo' from package 'xoo' (universe)
 Command 'fop' from package 'fop' (universe)
 Command 'fox' from package 'objcryst-fox' (universe)
 Command 'zoo' from package 'zoo' (universe)
 Command 'goo' from package 'goo' (universe)
foo: command not found
It's great when you have a new system and you haven't yet installed everything you need. Type emacs before emacs has been installed, and it will helpfully tell you the exact command to use to install it. After a while, though, you have all the packages you need, and the only time you see this feature in action is when you mistype something. When this happens to me, all the package suggestions and apt-get commands are just annoying. This, for example, is not helpful: 
$ les foo.txt
The program 'les' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install atm-tools
les: command not found
I'd much rather see this quick, short message so that I can get on with fixing my mistake by adding another 's': 
$ les foo.txt
-bash: les: command not found
I finally found how to fix it. Put this line in your .bashrc: 
unset command_not_found_handle
Much better.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I just ran "sudo apt-get remove command-not-found" - this helps for all shells and all users.
August 1, 2014 at 7:06 AM
Anonymous said…
If you just remove the command-not-found package, you won't have an error message at all for a bad command.
October 21, 2014 at 6:26 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Put /etc Under Revision Control (with git)

UPDATE : There is a much easier way now : sudo aptitude install etckeeper There, now etc is under revision control and changes are automatically committed with a helpful message after you install new packages. Thanks for the tip, Marcelo! Read on for the original blog entry. --- I put my /etc directory under revision control. I used git. It's awesome. Not that I think I'm going to wholesale copy my /etc from one machine to another, nor because I'm going to branch my /etc directory and spend weeks developing some cool new feature (whatever that would look like...) and then merge it back into the main branch. No, it's mostly because I like the idea of having the big "undo" option that having things under revision control provides. Having to commit changes and write check-in comments when I make changes helps me stay more organized too. It's never good when I go in willy-nilly to make a "quick change" to some configuration file. I r
Read more