Dear Chet,
I am currently not sure if we are on the same page on this topic. I'll try to come up with a code proposal on git as soon as possible.
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis. that's for sure unfortunately.

my expectation was more a sort of a belief. some magic hashtable behind the scenes taking into account functions and aliases. Fortunately architecture is far from a belief system...

Anyways, what concerns calling NOTFOUND_HOOK not with execute_shell_command, but execute_simple_command?
 
Isn't it like
(command_not_found_hook) vs. {command_not_found_hook} ?

Hi!
Actually I expected Bash to run the aliased command in "main" scope of the script.

for example:

   $ alias command_not_found_handle='source ~/bash.handle $@'
   $ some_command # which is yet unknown

So basically I expected bash to run `source ~/bash.handle some_command` silently in background and try to find the command beyond $PATH.

The issue with command_not_found_handle as function is, that everything happens inside the scope of the function in a subshell.

I still dream of dynamic sourcing... I'll try to implement it in bash source code.

I tried to do a

$ alias command_not_found_handle='source not_found $@'

but unfortunately it does not work. is this intentional?

Best wishes

Dominik Kummer