Insufficient information in the massage for commands that require sudo

Question

When we give a command without sudo which in fact require sudo, the message returned is  “command not found”. Its quite misleading. The message should prompt user that the particular command should be used with sudo.

“Hey, there. So currently, Solus has commands that run that require sudo in front of them to even be recognized (i.e. modprobe returns an error stating that the command isn’t found, while sudo modprobe works as it should). I think it would be wise to have Solus recognize these commands without sudo and just state that sudo is necessary, rather than saying that the commands don’t exist.

Otherwise I get the feeling that I need to look up additional information, or that Solus needs to have documented its list of recognized commands.”

Posted by SolarLune in Solus forum

Answer 1

“What happens is that /sbin /usr/sbin aren’t in $PATH for the user (because they are meant for admin usage). When you type a command without the full path, it searches $PATH for it. Therefore, for the user, it isn’t found as it’s not in their path directories (so working as it’s meant to).”

Answered by sunnyflunk in Solus forum

Comments

“I don’t know if it’s a “working as it’s supposed to” kind of thing – I think it’s more about communicating information back to the user, not necessarily the design of the operating system and its components. More information is, generally, always better.

I understand that some programs only exist in one location and for the root user, and would say that’s an OK design. However, if I type in “modprobe” and it says it doesn’t exist, my first inclination as a new Solus user is to think, “Huh, I guess Solus does things differently and doesn’t have modprobe?”, rather than “Oh, I need to use sudo”. Documentation on exactly what Solus contains and what is available to the user would also be good to help them understand exactly what tools are available for usage – some things Solus includes, some are available for download, and some don’t exist currently.”

Replied by SolarLune in Solus forum