uuencode Command not found but man working fine

Question

I am trying to mail using uuencode but it says command not found while if I check man, I get it proper without any error. Is it that my binary has gone and just docs remaining ? This is unusal though !

Answer 1

I think it's most likely that you just have the man-page for a command that's not installed at your system. uuencode used to be part of the "standard selection" of commands, but many of these are no-longer installed by default (eg. like compact, vi and ed) - mostly because new and better commands have taken their place. There are however "standard selections" of man-pages too (which is installed when you install man), so it's very likely that such a selection contains man-pages for commands not installed by default on a system.

See if you can find a package called "sharutils" or something like that, and install it.

Answer 2

Like Baard Kopperud said, this mean that man page installed by program itself does not.

All software in Red Hat is installed via packages. It's usual to package big set of basic system man pages belongs to one package, but program itself may belong to other.

In modern Red Hat you need to use yum provides '*/uudecode' to find which package you need to install for uudecode. In my RHEL5 package name is sharutils. As you figured out missing package name, use yum install <package>. Installation should be done with root privileges.

Answer 3

Please check the following forum: How do I get UUENCODE to work?

You need to install sharutils

dpkg based:

apt-get install sharutils

RPM based:

yum install sharutils