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I have set up two Debian Stretch systems, one new installation by 'netinst' CD, one upgraded from Jessie.

After that, I have installed the command-not-found package.

apt install command-not-found

The installation ran smoothly, with neither errors nor warnings. As suggested in the installation process output, I ran update-command-not-found subsequently. This command does not give any output at all and returns with exit code 0 - no errors.

However, when I type some non-existing command, I get an error nevertheless:

Could not find the database of available applications, run update-command-not-found as root to fix this
foobarbaz: command not found

This happens on both systems. I have no clue how to fix this issue. What have I missed?

UPDATE: For some reason update-command-not-found worked on my local system just now. It shows some download URLs fetching data from. Now, the console works as expected. I did nothing since this morning, the system had gone in sleep mode while I was absent.

On the remote system the issue is remaining.

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1 Answer 1

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The solution:

There were wrong entries in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. The package needs to be updated via the update repository. There has been a wrong entry derived from the provider's local Jessie mirror repository. I have changed the URLs to the original Stretch reporitory but missed to replace a slash by a dash (stretch/updates => stretch-updates).

Add to file /etc/apt/sources.list:

# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free

Run:

apt update
update-command-not-found
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  • 2
    The interesting thing is: You can spend hours or days without finding an answer. Just after posting a question you get the sudden inspiration. :)
    – Pinke Helga
    Jul 23, 2017 at 20:45
  • 3
    Actually, it was the apt update command that did the trick. Editing the sources.list was likely incorrect.
    – Nonny Moose
    Apr 19, 2018 at 12:57
  • Indeed the apt update was the important key step I was missing. It's funny, I run that almost religiously every few days, but I didn't think to do it after installing command-not-found until I read this. It would be nice if the little helper message that says "run update-command-not-found" also mentioned updating your apt repos... or perhaps the update-cnf command just did it for you...
    – Adam Plocher
    May 16, 2018 at 23:56
  • @NonnyMoose Actually there had been remaining incorrect entries in the sources.list. I routinely updated the repositories every time before changing any package installation. The differences between the local network mirror storage and public repositories caused the error in that case.
    – Pinke Helga
    May 26, 2018 at 3:30
  • Asked for sudo here, sudo apt-file update; sudo update-command-not-found
    – Wellington1993
    Jul 27, 2021 at 4:36

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