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