eatmydata command not found

Introduction

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

eatmydata: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: eatmydata: command not found

Solutions to eatmydata: command not found

How To Fix eatmydata: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu eatmydata is provided by eatmydata package.

eatmydata is:

This package contains a small LD_PRELOAD library (libeatmydata) and a couple of helper utilities designed to transparently disable fsync and friends (like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.

You will find eatmydata useful if particular software calls fsync(), sync() etc. frequently but the data it stores is not that valuable to you and you may afford losing it in case of system crash. Data-to-disk synchronization calls are typically very slow on modern file systems and their extensive usage might slow down software significantly. It does not make sense to accept such a hit in performance if data being manipulated is not very important.

On the other hand, do not use eatmydata when you care about what software stores or it manipulates important components of your system. The library is called libEAT-MY-DATA for a reason.

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

sudo apt-get -y install eatmydata

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

You can also use apt command to install eatmydata.

sudo apt -y install eatmydata

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

sudo aptitude install eatmydata

Summary

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