Diagnosing a missing command by walking PATH in order.

A bare command the shell cannot find

“Command not found” identifies a lookup failure, but lookup does not always mean walking every directory in PATH. In ordinary Bash, a command word without a slash can resolve to a function, builtin, cached executable path, or a newly searched executable. An alias may already have changed the command while the input was read. Inspect the shell that actually reported the failure before reinstalling a tool that may already exist. ...

May 20, 2027 · 4 min · XB Field Notes