Find what package a file belongs to in Ubuntu/Debian?

Question

I frequently find myself missing a program, man page, or other file when working on my Ubuntu 8.04 system. Is there any simple way to look up what package contains a given file (whether it is installed already or not)? Maybe some obscure option for apt or dpkg?

Answer 1

apt-file search filename

or

apt-file search /path/to/file

To install apt-file, use:

apt-get install apt-file

you will need to update its database before you can use it:

sudo apt-file update

Answer 2

I found Wajig...

wajig whichpackage /path/to/file 

eg.

wajig whichpackage /etc/apt/sources.list

Wajig is a handy command line or console tool which wraps all the apt-get, dpkg goodness that you never wanted to learn. .

To install wajig use:

apt-get install wajig

That command 'whichpackage' itself depends on apt-file

you will still need to update its database before you can use it: - I don't know yet if wajig update whixh does an apt-get update also updates the file cache, but I expect it may.

sudo wajig update

sudo apt-file update

( and Super Cow, Easter egss ? ! )

Answer 3

Try searching for files using http://www.kodkast.com/applications/find-which-package-file-belongs-to

This is an application to search for files which are contained in different rpms/linux packages, and is very useful when you dont even have the rpm installed on your machine.

Answer 4

You can also use dlocate. From the man page;

$ dlocate [ PATTERN ]
List all records where either the package name or the filename matches PATTERN.

Answer 5

packages.debian.org is what I always use to accomplish this task. It is superior over apt-file because it can find parts of filenames as well. It's also linked up to the main packages list which will list descriptions, bugs, etc. All in all a good website. Not as useful from the command line, but still quite useful.

For speed, I bookmarked the url:

http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=%s&mode=filename&suite=unstable&arch=any

in Firefox, and added "debfind" as a keyword (click "more" in the bookmark manager with it hilighted), so I can just type "debfind " and it will work. You can change 'suite' it from unstable to stable or testing if you like, for other versions of the distribution.

Answer 6

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to:

dpkg -S /usr/bin/ls

'dpkg -S' just matches the string you supply it, so just using 'ls' as an argument matches any file from any package that has 'ls' anywhere in the filename. So usually it's a good idea to use an absolute path. You can see in the second example that 12 thousand files that are known to dpkg match the bare string 'ls'.