When you type an illegal npm command, you are getting a user-friendly error message stating which commands are legal to use:
$ npm illegal
Usage: npm <command>
where <command> is one of:
add-user, adduser, apihelp, author, bin, bugs, c, cache,
completion, config, ddp, dedupe, deprecate, docs, edit,
explore, faq, find, find-dupes, get, help, help-search,
home, i, info, init, install, isntall, issues, la, link,
list, ll, ln, login, ls, outdated, owner, pack, prefix,
prune, publish, r, rb, rebuild, remove, repo, restart, rm,
root, run-script, s, se, search, set, show, shrinkwrap,
star, stars, start, stop, submodule, tag, test, tst, un,
uninstall, unlink, unpublish, unstar, up, update, v,
version, view, whoami
As you may notice, among others there is isntall command.
What is the point of this command? If this was created to handle typos, then why doesn't it have a special handling for intall, insatll etc? Besides, uninstall doesn't have a corresponding unisntall option.
(Using npm 1.3.22 version).
The reason I ask is that I'm a bit surprised and confused about how the typo is handled. For example, git compares the command you've entered and suggests the closest commands it has available:
$ git stats
git: 'stats' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
Did you mean this?
status
Also, pip Python package manager has a similar functionality built-in:
$ pip isntall
ERROR: unknown command "isntall" - maybe you meant "install"
FYI, under-the-hood it uses difflib.get_close_matches() function.
I was the original "raiser" of the connected issue on Github, and those were the first days of contributing to OSS software... I thought it was just a typo, and maybe a pull request would solve it. But I was blessed with some good sense to first raise an issue (#2933) to find out if they were looking for contribution on that front...
As it turned out, it unravelled a whole discussion around the issue, which was good to see.
The raison d'être of the isntall command is because the npm maintainers believe that it saves them time — and thus, by extension — several other developers. As has been discussed in the linked issue, this was a contentious decision, and several people have suggested more interesting methods for resolving typos such as using the levenshtein distance calculation of the illegal command from valid npm commands (https://www.npmjs.org/package/levenshtein).
At any rate, I presume if you do implement one of those algos and contribute to the npm project, it would be a nice addition to this awesome library...
Because there's no way to handle every single possible typo, without breaking other stuff. Init could possibly be a typo of install.
Could do levenshtein distance from your input or something but introduces unnecessary complexity.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26987238/npm-isntall-command-exists