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Thomas Ward
Asked: 2011-04-14 17:45:13 +0800 CST

Configuring to detect if a command does not exist, suggest installation

  • 772

Can the zsh shell be configured to show what bash shows when a command does not exist, similarly to this:

kahless:~$ sysv-rc-conf  
The program 'sysv-rc-conf' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:  
sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

rather than the ZSH prompt:

[kahless /home/teward]% sysv-rc-conf  
zsh: command not found: sysv-rc-conf

Note I do not want to change the prompt itself, but I want to change the result from zsh: command not found to a bash-like output of The program 'progname' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: or similar.

Is this possible with ZSH?

zsh

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This feature is provided by the command-not-found Install command-not-found package. Ubuntu installs it by default, and makes it active by default in bash but not in zsh. Just add this line to your ~/.zshrc:

    . /etc/zsh_command_not_found
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  2. Note that you might want to add a check if the file exists if you are sharing your .zshrc across distributions that do not have a /etc/zsh_command_not_found file:

    [[ -a "/etc/zsh_command_not_found" ]] && . /etc/zsh_command_not_found

    Also, in case you're using oh-my-zsh, there already is a plugin, command-not-found, that you can add to your plugins variable that does the same thing.

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  3. If you are using oh-my-zsh, you can just instead looks for "plugins" inside your .zshrc.

    Add the command-not-found plugin to the list of plugins to autoload (this plugin is already installed by default).

    Like this:

    # Which plugins would you like to load? (plugins can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/*)
# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(git command-not-found)
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  4. The way it works is through the command_not_found_handle() function in bash. bash provides a hook which is basically a function that is invoked when a command is not found. Ubuntu's bash implementation traps it and does a package search, while Debian's bash does not (and same with zsh). You may want to check out zsh's manpage to see if that has a similar function.

    Here is how you can get started, hoping zsh is similar.

    mpandit@mpandit-ubuntu:~$ command_not_found_handle() {echo 'Handler: Command not found!';}
mpandit@mpandit-ubuntu:~$ ddaadada
'Handler: Command not found!
mpandit@mpandit-ubuntu:~$
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  5. Also if you don't want zsh to have this behavior 100% of the time you can just manually do something like:

    /usr/lib/command-not-found urxvt

    or add command-not-found to your $PATH

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