Field guide to command line failures · reference only, nothing hosted here
CliHelper

About CliHelper

CliHelper exists because error messages are bad at explaining themselves. Every person who has run a command for a year has a category of failures they can recognise instantly and still cannot fix without searching - the permission error that is not really about permissions, the certificate problem that is about a name, the exit code that could mean six unrelated things.

Organised by symptom, not by tool

Most troubleshooting references are indexed by program. That works if you already know which program you are running. More often you know what the machine said and not what to do about it. So every CliHelper entry starts from the message or the exit status and works back to a cause.

What an entry contains

The message as it actually appears, what produces it, how to distinguish it from the things that look like it, the command to run to confirm the cause, and the fix. Where a fix is not permanent, that is said.

Verified, and marked where it is not

Commands are run against the tools before publication. Where behaviour depends on version, distribution or shell, the entry says so instead of generalising. Where something is inferred rather than confirmed, it is written as inference.

What is not here

No software is hosted or distributed. No package managers are pointed at. Entries describe what the tools do and how they fail when they are already installed.

Corrections

Reports are reproduced before anything changes. If an entry turns out to describe a different failure than it claims, that is a correction and it gets made.

CliHelper documents failure modes of third-party command line tools. No software is stored or distributed here.

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