mkfontdir command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix mkfontdir command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

mkfontdir: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: mkfontdir: command not found

In Ubuntu mkfontdir is provided by xfonts-utils package.

xfonts-utils is:

xfonts-utils provides a set of utility programs shipped with the X Window System that are needed for font management.

The programs in this package include:

bdftopcf, which converts BDF fonts to PCF fonts;
bdftruncate and ucs2any, tools to generate fonts with various encodings from ISO 10646-encoded fonts
mkfontdir, a program to generate fonts.dir files;
mkfontscale, a program to generate fonts.scale files;
fonttosfnt, a program to wrap bitmap fonts in a sfnt (TrueType) wrapper.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install xfonts-utils

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install xfonts-utils.

sudo apt -y install xfonts-utils

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install xfonts-utils

In this tutorial we learn how to fix mkfontdir command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.