snap info <package> this will show the commands of the installed snap (but doesn’t say whether it is installed or not).
Close out of your terminals and open them again. Log out and log back in. If you remove a package with apt, and then install the snap, the terminal might still be trying to look for the apt package until you log out or do something with hashes.
Hi, I’m looking for general tips that can be applicable to this specific problem. I installed an app via Ubuntu App Center, but the “open” button is grayed out. If I uninstall and reinstall using the commandline, it installs successfully, but the command is not found when you try to run it.
Problem Description:
Try to install and use the “tldr” snap.
$ sudo snap install tldr
tldr 3.4.4 from K.B.Dharun Krishna (kbdk) installed
$ tldr
bash: /usr/bin/tldr: No such file or directory
127 $ tldr-python-client
tldr-python-client: command not found
It’s odd that it’s reporting problems in /usr/bin/tldr, since if tldr is a snap it should be in /snap/bin/tldr. Is there another version of tldr that you installed. maybe tealdeer?
dpkg -S /usr/bin/tldr
would show if there’s a package owning the file.
If you got rid of /usr/bin/tldr, the snap version might be able to run.
To me this actually looks like he has already removed the old package before installing the snap but hasn’t updated the hash the shell uses to speed up finding commands. If ‘/usr/bin/tldr’ is already in the hash as the program to call when ‘tldr’ is entered at the prompt and you then remove the package providing ‘/usr/bin/tldr’ and install the snap, you might see this behaviour until you run hash -d tldr to delete the old value from the hash and force a new search for the program.
It looks like snap info tldr gives me the same information as the Ubuntu App Center page. There is no automatic/procedural list of files or commands for the snap, just what the person typed into the description.
name: tldr
summary: Official Python command-line client for tldr pages.
publisher: K.B.Dharun Krishna (kbdk)
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/tldr
contact: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr-python-client/issues
license: MIT
description: |
The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools,
that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.
This Snap package contains `tldr-python-client`, the official Python command-line client for tldr
pages.
snap-id: boJcr9iXgB7MiTForPg1Bq0siGqu9t1q
channels:
latest/stable: 3.4.4 2026-02-07 (791) 65kB -
latest/candidate: ↑
latest/beta: ↑
latest/edge: 3.4.4 2026-03-03 (796) 65kB -
ogra@styx:~$ snap info tldr
name: tldr
summary: Official Python command-line client for tldr pages.
publisher: K.B.Dharun Krishna (kbdk)
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/tldr
contact: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr-python-client/issues
license: unset
description: |
The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools,
that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.
This Snap package contains `tldr-python-client`, the official Python command-line client for tldr
pages.
commands:
- tldr
snap-id: boJcr9iXgB7MiTForPg1Bq0siGqu9t1q
tracking: latest/stable
refresh-date: heute um 22:27 CET
channels:
latest/stable: 3.4.4 2026-02-07 (792) 65kB -
latest/candidate: ↑
latest/beta: ↑
latest/edge: 3.4.4 2026-03-03 (800) 65kB -
installed: 3.4.4 (792) 65kB -
ogra@styx:~$ tldr
usage: tldr command [options]
Python command line client for tldr
[...]
As you can see, here it says:
commands:
- tldr
The info isn’t in the metadata the store sends, but once the snap is installed snapd knows the commands …
I think this must have been the problem, because it is working for me now, and all I did was log out and back in again.
Perhaps this is a UX thing that could be more clear – if you remove a .deb, and install a snap, log out and log back in again, or you’ll get mysterious errors!
I did install it, but it looks like there was something weird going on until I logged out and back in. Maybe that’s why the “open” was grayed out in the App Center.
Did you have snapd uninstalled at some point and re-installed it later ?
IIRC it adds /snap/bin to your path by a file it ships in /etc/environment.d, if you did not have snapd installed when you logged in that would be an explanation of such a behavior.
Might be, not sure how it handles the $PATH variable, AFAIK byobou has not seen any update in a very long time so perhaps the world has changed around it without itself noticing
(read: you might have found a bug with it …)
Let’s be honest here: how often do you think this – removing a program and installing a replacement with the same name in a different place – happens ? In all the years since I started using Linux in the late 90’s it’s happened to me exactly twice (and snap wasn’t even a twinkle in it’s designer’s eyes back then; I installed a newer version of a program from source into /usr/local/ after removing an rpm package from the SuSE I ran back then …). It’s one of those rare corner cases.
It could in theory be fixed quite easily by having 'hash -d ’ with the names of all executables from a package in the post-removal script of all deb-packages.
Edit: logging out and back in isn’t even necessary: even without knowing about the ‘hash’ command to fix it in the running shell you can just close the terminal and start a new one to get a new shell that would have an empty hash.
No, it’s greyed out because it’s a command line program that is not useful at all unless you pass it some additional parameters – meaning the name(s) of the program(s) you want to read a short and incomplete version of the man page of. The App-center would have to offer an input box for the necessary parameters and start a terminal to run the program in – talk about feature-creep …
In hindsight, I can see why it would be gray if it were CLI only. Usually in the computer world, when something is grayed out that is usually green, it means something is broken. So in this case, maybe it should be more clear that it did install successfully, but is CLI so can’t be “opened”.
Happens to me whenever something is broken and I have to install a new version of it. If I understand correctly, if you are using the byobu terminal, you would have to close all open terminals to get a fresh one, but not necessarily log out.
It just so happened that I left my computer idle for a bit and it locked the screen anyway, so when I returned and logged back in, I was able to install the snap and use it as intended.
you’d have to add some AI to the app center to read people’s minds first