On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 12:50 +0200, nigel henry wrote: > This is mainly a problem for newbies, who trying a command, are returned to > the prompt with a "command not found", which can mean many things. In this > case the path to the command is missing, but could also be due to a typo, > need to be root, package not installed, and so on, and is a bit confusing > initially. I'm reminded of this rather lovely command that we had on ye olde Amiga OS, "why". If you got an error message back from some command, it was typically terse (as the above "command not found" example), experienced users would know what it meant, and didn't get cluttered with large error messages (unlike the Data General mainframe I once used, that'd give you a two-liner for nearly every little error). But if you wanted more information on why you got the last error message, you'd just type in "why" into the console. Then you'd get something much more verbose. -- (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
